Russell Sturgis (1805-1887)

Russell Sturgis (1805–1887) was a Boston merchant active in the China trade, and later head of Baring Brothers, London.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1805, Sturgis was a grandson of the noted merchant of the same name and his wife Elizabeth Perkins Sturgis, a son of Nathaniel Russell Sturgis (1779–1856) and his wife Susannah Parkman, and a great-nephew of Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Sturgis went to Harvard College at the age of twelve. In 1828 he made his first voyage abroad then practiced law in Boston for a time. He sailed for Canton in 1833 on behalf of opium trader John Perkins Cushing, settling for some time in Macau where Lady Elizabeth Napier, wife of British emissary William John, 9th Lord Napier, found him "very intelligent". While he was there, his portrait and those of three of his four children by second wife Mary Greene Hubbard — Russell, Lucy Lyman Paine, and John Hubbard (who became the architect John Hubbard Sturgis) — were painted by the English portraitist George Chinnery. In Asia he entered a succession of trading firms (Russell & Sturgis of Manila; Russell, Sturgis & Co. of Canton; Russell & Co.), and in 1842 he became a full partner.

In 1844 Sturgis retired to Boston to rejoin his children who had been sent there to school after their mother's 1837 death in Manila. He married, for a third time, Julia Overing Boit (who bore him four more children -- Henry Parkman, Julian Russell, Mary Greene Hubbard, and Howard Overing) and decided to return to China with his family in 1851. The steamer on which they crossed the Atlantic arrived too late to catch the onward ship from London. In their interval there, Sturgis was asked by the senior member of Barings Bank to become a partner. He accepted and ultimately became head of the firm.

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