By day John Russell was Georgian Britain's foremost pastel portraitist, commanding fees on a par with Reynolds and Gainsborough; by night, for the better part of two decades, he trained a telescope lent by his friend William Herschel on the moon, producing The Face of the Moon, an astonishingly detailed pastel drawing that scholars still regard as the most accurate depiction of the lunar surface made before photography. Born in Guildford in 1745, the eldest son of a prosperous bookseller who served five terms as the town's mayor, Russell showed early promise, winning a Society of Arts prize at fourteen, and in 1760 was apprenticed to the pastel pioneer Francis Cotes, spending seven formative years in his Cork Street studio before opening his own practice in 1767.
Russell exhibited at the Royal Academy every year between 1769 and 1806, an unbroken run of thirty-eight years totalling 332 pastels, and became the portraitist of choice for Britain's intellectual and social elite, painting the abolitionist William Wilberforce, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, and Herschel himself holding a chart of his discovery of Uranus. Royal patronage followed in stages: Crayon Painter in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales from 1785, full Royal Academician from 1788, and holder of the same royal title for George III and the Duke of York by 1790. Alongside this immensely successful public career, Russell pursued his lunar observations as a private, almost devotional undertaking, recording in his diary the spiritual force of his midnight vigils; his finished lunar map, engraved onto plates that formed a globe he called the Selenographia, took twenty years to complete and represented a genuine scientific contribution to the understanding of the moon's surface, made using an artist's eye at a moment before any camera could capture such detail directly. A serious bout of cholera in 1803 left him deaf, and he died of typhus in Hull in 1806, while still travelling to fulfil portrait commissions.
The portrait by Russell held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings depicts Elizabeth Freeman, and connects the gallery's collection to a genuinely remarkable figure whose achievements straddled the fashionable portrait world of Georgian London and the frontier of amateur astronomical observation with equal distinction.