Russell Smith was a Scottish-born American painter.
Background
Russell was born on April 26, 1812 in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Although christened William Thompson Russell Smith, he was known simply as Russell Smith. His father, William Thompson Smith, and his mother, Margaret (Russell) Smith, a practising physician who had studied medicine in Glasgow, emigrated to America with their children in 1819 because of their political views. They settled in Indiana County, but moved to Pittsburgh in 1824. There Russell's father, who is said to have been "an ingenious mechanic, excelling in the manufacture of cutlery, artists' tools, and mathematical instruments", established a cutlery business.
Education
He had four years of study under the painter James Reid Lambdin.
Career
Russell began his art career by painting with house paints life-sized portraits of Gen. William Jackson, 1759-1828, and Lafayette. He also joined a dramatic society, for which he played female parts and painted scenery.
In 1833, when Francis Courtney Wemyss, manager of the Pittsburgh Theatre, took Edwin Forrest to Pittsburgh, Smith was asked in an emergency to paint the scenery, although actor and producer doubted the ability of so young a man. The result was a tent scene for Metamora so successful that Smith attached himself to Wemyss as professional scene-painter and began an active career that was spent partly in Boston, but mostly in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
The years 1851-52 he and his family spent in Europe, returning so that Smith could produce a panorama of Mexico and California, and a diorama of the Holy Land (both exhibited in Philadelphia) as well as much operatic scenery and a number of drop-curtains, including those for Welsh's old National Theatre in Philadelphia and for the Boston Museum.
When the Philadelphia Academy of Music was built, 1855-56, he was commissioned to produce its landscape drop-curtain, scenery for its operas, and additional drop-curtains, a task that stretched through the years almost until the time of his death.
In addition to his scene painting, he devoted considerable time to illustrations for scientific lectures, drawings for geological surveys, and occasional landscapes in oil. Always interested in observing nature closely, he made sketching trips to picturesque parts of Virginia, New England, and Pennsylvania, using the resultant material in composing such landscape drop-curtains as that in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. After a vigorous old age he died in his home in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
Smith believed that unless he executed the entire project himself his individuality as an artist would suffer.
Connections
On April 7, 1838, at Milestown, he married Mary Priscilla Wilson. His wife, well educated and of a cultured family, had been a teacher of French and Latin, and was a painter of flowers. They had two children, Xanthus and Mary, both painters.