Russell_Sturgis

Russell Sturgis (1836-1909), American architect and art critic, was born in Baltimore county, Maryland, on the 16th of October 1836. He graduated from the Free Academy in New York (now the College of the City of New York) in 1856, and studied architecture under Leopold Eidlitz and then for two years in Munich. In 1862 he returned to the United States. He designed the Yale University chapel and the Farnham and Durfee dormitories at Yale, the Flower Hospital, the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank of Albany, and many other buildings, but did comparatively little professional work after 1880. He was in Europe in 1880-1884; and for a short time after his return was secretary of the New York Municipal Civil Service Board. He was president of the Architectural League of New York in 1889-1893, was first president of the Fine Arts Federation in 1895-1897, and was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters, the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design, and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He lectured on art at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Peabody Institute of Baltimore and the Art Institute of Chicago; his lectures in Chicago being published under the title The Interdependence of the Arts of Design (1905). He is best known as a writer on art and architecture. He edited A Dictionary of Architecture and Building (3 vols., 1901-1902) and the English version of Wilhelm Luebke's Outlines of the History of Art (2 vols., 1904), and he wrote European Architecture (1896), How to Judge Architecture (1903), The Appreciation of Sculpture (1904), The Appreciation of Pictures (1905), A Study of the Artist's Way of Working in the Various Handicrafts and Arts of Design (2 vols., 1905), and an unfinished History of Architecture (1906 sqq.). During his last years he was nearly blind. He died in New York on the 11th of February 1909.