Census reports give the birthplace of Moses B. Russell as either New Hampshire or Massachusetts. Russell worked in Boston between 1831 and 1853, and after his wife's death, spent almost a decade in Italy. He returned to Boston in 1863, and worked there, and in New York and Philadelphia for the rest of his life. His wife, Clarissa, was also a miniaturist, and their son, Aelbert Cuyp Russell, named after a seventeenth-century Dutch painter, was an engraver and illustrator.