Walter Bowman Russell

Walter Russell grew up in Boston, the son of immigrants from Nova Scotia. The Boston of his time was awash with new ideas, but he achieved fame and fortune when he and his bride moved to New York City in 1894. There he became a magazine art editor, a war correspondent, and a children’s portrait painter.  A dearth of studio space led him into a joint venture in cooperative apartment building. In May of 1921 he had an out-of-body experience he called Cosmic Illumination. New knowledge was revealed to him “in the Light.”  Debates with scientists and several books followed as he tried to explain his new knowledge.  At age 56 he turned to sculpture, rising to the top with the Mark Twain Memorial and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Russell is associated with the New Thought Movement and with the Science of Man. The New York Herald-Tribune called him “The Modern Leonardo,” and to Glenn Clark, his biographer, he was “The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe.”