The huge cache of over 3000 letters between Russell and Matty and more with their family and friends resides in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. This is the single largest collection of their written words. The original correspondence “motherlode” donated by Louis Hyde has been supplemented by gifts of more letters, photo albums, and other memorabilia by members of the Cheney family, who were careful enough to keep them and generous enough to share them with generations to come.

Richard Candee has cited dozens of reviews in the Exhibitions section of this website.  Art critic Dorothy Adlow followed Russell Cheney through his career and was sympathetic to his work. Following his death, she wrote that he “was a New England artist who enjoyed the exhilarating influence of modern French painting. There were many painters of his generation who shared a comparable enthusiasm, but who failed to carry on with his consistent buoyancy… The latter-day work of Mr. Cheney was executed in simple New England surroundings, in Maine and New Hampshire. But the erstwhile exuberance remained; the impact of telling design persisted, although now it was inspired by a modest white meetinghouse, a trim lighthouse, some weatherworn fishing-shacks on the coast of Maine.  It is touching to find the New Englander, world-traveled, well-read, widely-informed, discovering the universal qualities of beauty in rural New England… The mood of ebullience, the spontaneity and sparkle of the Cheney paintings, the note of affirmation, has temporarily gone out of most American painting.”— The Christian Science Monitor, April 3, 1947