Rodney Fryer Russell

Rodney Russell in Dorset in 1978

Rodney Fryer Russell RWS (1918–1996) was a well known West Country watercolourist and portrait painter and poet.^[1]

He was born in Dorset, England. He had a brother Christopher (who died before the war) and a sister Joan.

In 1950 he won a scholarship to Paris and lived in London, West Sussex, Spain and Dorset.^[2] Having half completed an architectural degree at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) by 1939, he commanded an ML off the coast of Britain and saw service in the Far East.^[3] It was while on active service in the north of England that he met the artist Edward Seago at Leighton Hall, becoming a lifelong admirer of his work. After the war Russell studied art at the L.C.C. Central School of Art and Design and worked for ten years as a commercial artist.

Russell married Elisabeth Shettle, with whom he had a daughter Virginia and two sons James and David. On Elisabeth's death he married the Argentine Doreen Gildea, with whom he had a single child, the cultural historian Anthony Russell. His last wife Pamela Till, with whom he lived at Manston House in Dorset, was also a portrait and landscape painter and the pupil of Pietro Annigoni, living still in Dorset.

References