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George William Russell (1867 - 1935):
Artist and writer


Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh on 10 April 1867, moving to Dublin with his family when he was eleven. In 1890, he started work at Pym's store in Dublin. For many years, beginning in 1897, he worked full-time for Sir Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, a co-operative movement.

He began as a 'missionary', travelling extensively throughout Ireland convincing farmers of the benefit of developing credit societies and co-operative banks. He became editor first of The Irish Homestead, and later of its successor, The Irish Statesman, where he published Patrick Kavanagh's early poems, until it ceased publication in 1930.

 After leaving school in 1884, Russell went to Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art where he first met W.B.Yeats, who became his friend and later his rival. In that year too Russell suddenly began to experience waking dreams of astonishing power and vividness which seemed to be thrust into his consciousness by a mind which was not his. A.E.'s and Yeats's interests in these visions led both to Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Movement, with A.E. later joining the Dublin group.

Russell was one of the major writers in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Among his poetry collections are Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894); The Earth Breath (1897); The Divine Vision (1904); Collected Poems (London, MacMillan, 1913/New York, John Lane, 1916); Salutation (1917) The House of the Titans (1934); and Selected Poems (1935). His mystical writings include The Candle of Vision (1918); The Avatars (1933); The Interpreters (1922); and Song and its Fountains (1932).

Russell was principally a painter of landscapes with figures, and of wonderful beings who might be incorporated into the landscapes, or be the dominant features on the canvas, often with amazed mortals observing them. This fluency, and habit of moving from one canvas to a new one to capture a new image meant that his pictures were often left unfinished, and as a result many of them are not as good as he could have made them. Those he did complete are often outstanding. He used the pseudonym AE.

Russell died on July 17, 1935, in Bournemouth, England. He is buried in Dublin.



Born: 10 April 1867
Died: 17 July 1935
Patrick Devlin