Biographer Glenn Clark identifies four instructors who prepared him for an art career: Albert Munsell and Ernest Major in Boston, Howard Pyle in Philadelphia, and Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris.

[2] In his youth, Russell earned money as a church organist and music teacher, and by conducting a trio in a hotel.

"[7] The Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street in Manhattan, designed by architect George Mort Pollard, has been described as his masterpiece.

[8] Russell was also involved in the initial development of Alwyn Court, at Seventh Avenue and 58th Street in Manhattan, but dropped out before the project's completion.

[10] At age 56 he turned to sculpture and fashioned portrait busts of Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, General MacArthur, John Philip Sousa, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Charles Goodyear, George Gershwin and others.

[13] Russell claimed to have experienced a transformational and revelatory event in May 1921, which he later described in a chapter called "The Story of My Illumining" in the 1950 edition of his Home Study Course.

[18] Russell's cosmogony was described in A New Concept of the Universe,[19] where he wrote that "the cardinal error of science" was "shutting the Creator out of his Creation.

She changed her name to Lao (after Lao-Tzu, the Chinese illuminate) and they embarked on a cross-country automobile trip from Reno looking for a place to establish a workplace and a museum for his work.

They discovered Swannanoa, the palatial estate of a railroad magnate, long abandoned, on a mountaintop on the border of Augusta and Nelson Counties in Virginia,[24] and leased the property for 50 years.

[25] There they established the museum and the Walter Russell Foundation, and in 1957 the Commonwealth of Virginia granted a charter for the University of Science and philosophy, a correspondence school with a home study course.