Walter Russell


Walter Bowman Russell was an impressionist American painter, sculptor, and author. His lectures and writing place him firmly in the New Thought Movement.

Life and career

Born in Boston on May 19, 1871, to Nova Scotian immigrants, Russell left school at age 9 and went to work, then put himself through the Massachusetts Normal Art School. He interrupted his fourth year to spend three months in Paris at the Académie Julian. 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.
In his youth, Russell earned money as a church organist and music teacher, and by conducting a trio in a hotel.
Before he left Boston in 1894, Russell married Helen Andrews.The couple traveled to Paris for their wedding trip and a second term for him at the Académie Julian. After their wedding trip, Russell and his wife settled in New York City in 1894 and had two daughters, Helen and Louise. Russell's rise in New York was immediate; a reporter wrote in 1908, "Mr. Russell came here from Boston and at once became a great artistic success."
Walter Russell's careers as an illustrator, correspondent in the Spanish–American War, child portrait painter and builder are detailed in several questionnaires he answered and submitted to Who's Who in America.
At age 29, he attracted widespread attention with his allegorical painting The Might of Ages in 1900. The painting represented the United States at the Turin international exhibition and won several awards.
By 1903, Russell had published three children's books and qualified for the Authors Club, which he joined in 1902.
Russell made his mark as a builder, creating $30 million worth of top-quality cooperative apartments. He is credited with developing "cooperative ownership into an economically sound and workable principle." The Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street in Manhattan, designed by architect George Mort Pollard, has been described as his masterpiece.
In the 1930s, Russell was employed by Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, as a motivational speaker for IBM employees. He was employed at IBM for twelve years, during which time he and Watson developed a new concept of utilitarian business ethics.
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. He rose to top rank as a sculptor. He won the commissions for the Mark Twain Memorial and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms Monument.
Russell became a leader in the Science of Man Movement when he was elected president of the Society of Arts and Sciences in 1927. His seven year tenure generated many articles in the New York Times. The gold medals awarded by the Society were highly valued.'
As World War II approached, he moved into a top-floor studio at Carnegie Hall, where he lived alone. At the time, he was supervising the casting of the Four Freedoms'. This was a low time that required a rejuvenation of his health and spirit. There were reports of his "egotism and self-aggrandizement" that bothered him.

The Russell Cosmogony

In May 1921 Russell claimed to have experienced a transformational, revelatory event that he later described in a chapter called "The Story of My Illumining" in the 1950 edition of his Home Study Course. "During that period...I could perceive all motion," and was newly "aware of all things." Russell used the terminology of Richard Maurice Bucke in his book Cosmic Consciousness to explain "cosmic illumination." Later he wrote, "It will be remembered that no one who has ever had has been able to explain it. I deem it my duty to the world to tell of it." Russell's supposed knowledge gained "in the Light" is the subject matter of his book The Divine Iliad, published in two volumes in 1949.
After five years Russell published The Universal One and The Russell Genero-Radiative Concept and defended his ideas in the pages of the New York Times in 1930-1931. He later published The Secret of Light and A New Concept of the Universe.
The Russell Cosmogony was described in his treatise, A New Concept of the Universe where he wrote that "the cardinal error of science" is "shutting the Creator out of his Creation." Russell never referred to an anthropomorphic god, but rather wrote that "God is the invisible, motionless, sexless, undivided, and unconditioned white Magnetic Light of Mind" which centers all things. "God is provable by laboratory methods," Russell wrote, "The locatable motionless Light which man calls magnetism is the Light which God IS." He wrote that Religion and Science must come together in a New Age.
Russell accepted Richard Maurice Bucke's premise that not only the human body, but also human consciousness, had evolved in stages, that human consciousness periodically made iterative leaps, such as that from animal awareness to rational self-awareness, many millennia ago.

With Lao Russell at Swannanoa in Virginia 1948-1963

Russell's life was changed by a phone call from Daisy Stebbing in 1946. Daisy was an immigrant from England, a former model and businesswoman, who was living in Boston. She had read Glenn Clark's book, The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe. In 1948, Walter at age 77 divorced his first wife and married Daisy Stebbing age 44, amid some controversy. She changed her name to Lao 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 outside of Waynesboro, Virginia.
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. Walter and Lao Russell collaborated on a number of books. The testing of atomic bombs in the atmosphere prompted them to publish Atomic Suicide? in 1957 in which they warned of grave consequences for the planet and for humankind if radioactivity was exploited as a world fuel. Walter Russell died in 1963. Lao died in 1988.

Books