Benjamin Russell (artist)

File:BenjaminRussell ca1850.png

Benjamin Russell, ca.1850

Benjamin Russell (October 16, 1804 - March 3, 1885) was an American artist best known for his accurate watercolors of whaling ships working in New England. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to a wealthy family, Russell started drawing and painting in his late 30s, after a few years spent working as a cooper aboard a whaling ship.

File:WhalingVoyage ca1848 byRussell and Purrington detail NewBedfordWhalingMuseum2.png

Detail from Whaling Voyage Round the World by Russell & Purrington, ca.1848

Russell's depiction of perspective and depth are stiff and flat, and his images "were appreciated more for their accurate representation than their artistic value." However, most of his work is perfectly to scale, resembling control drawings, and Russell watercolors are some of the better views of the mid-19th-century American whaling industry, until photography became available in the 1850s.

Russell began making lithographs in 1848, and began teaching art in Rhode Island, after the American Civil War ended in 1865.

He attended the University of Virginia, where he was a member of the Alpha chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity.

Image gallery

• WhalingVoyage ca1848 byRussell and Purrington detail NewBedfordWhalingMuseum12.png

  Detail from Whaling Voyage Round the World by Russell & Purrington, ca.1848

• WhalingVoyage ca1848 byRussell and Purrington detail NewBedfordWhalingMuseum10.png

  Detail from Whaling Voyage Round the World by Russell & Purrington, ca.1848

• WhalingVoyage ca1848 byRussell and Purrington EssexDetail NewBedfordWhalingMuseum1.png

  Wreck of the Essex; detail from Whaling Voyage Round the World by Russell & Purrington, ca.1848

• 1849 whaling AmoryHall Boston.png

  Advertisement for performance at Boston's Amory Hall of Whaling Voyage Round the World, 1849

Further reading

• Robert L. Carothers and John L. Marsh. The Whale and the Panorama. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Dec., 1971), pp. 319–328.
• Kevin J. Avery. "Whaling Voyage Round the World": Russell and Purrington's Moving Panorama and Herman Melville's "Mighty Book." American Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 50–78.

External links

• New Bedford Whaling Museum biography