George Horne Russell was born on April 18, 1861, in Banff, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

He was a Scottish-Canadian painter who studied at the Aberdeen School of Art and the South Kensington School of Art. In 1889, he moved to Canada settling in Montreal, Quebec. While he came to be celebrated for his portraits (Sir Alexander Lacoste, Dr. Barbour, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and Lord Strathcona), Russell’s profound love for natural beauty, and particularly the sea motivated him to paint pastoral scenes and seascapes. Painting portraits gave him the financial freedom to indulge his fondness for painting nature without concern for a future buyer. He enjoyed spending summers at his country house at St. Andrews by the Sea in New Brunswick. In 1909, the Grand Trunk Railway made him an offer to paint the Rockies and the Skeena River district of British Columbia, resulting in some large and impressive canvases of these mountains. From 1922 to 1926, he was the president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

In 1889, he married Elizabeth Morrison, in Boston, Massachusetts. He died on June 25, 1933, in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.

Lindsay Russel was the Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1882-1883.

Colin Kerr Russel (1877-1956) joined the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in 1906 as Assistant Demonstrator in Clinical Medicine. In 1913 he became Lecturer in Clinical Neurology and held various positions including Associate Professor from 1937-1945. The fonds includes American Neurological Association material (1934-1941), army files (1939-1943), correspondence, lecture notes, glass slides, large glass negatives, colour screen filters, and reprints with a card index.