William Russell Birch (1755–1834), artist, was born in Warwickshire, England. He was trained as an enamel painter by Henry Spicer and befriended by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Birch produced portraits of English notables, still lifes, landscapes, and historical compositions, exhibiting at the Society of Artists in 1775 and at the Royal Academy, 1781–94. He also published a set of picturesque engravings, Delices de la Grande Bretagne (London, 1791). In 1794 Birch immigrated to Philadelphia. He soon became a favored portraitist of the elite, and his celebrated portraits included an enamel miniature of George Washington. Birch showed his 1795 engraving of TJ (after Charles Willson Peale’s 1791 portrait) in that year’s exhibition of the Columbianum, an artists’ society he helped found. By 1800 he moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. TJ subscribed to The City of Philadelphia, … as it appeared in the Year 1800 (Springland Cot, near Bristol, Pa., 1800; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4161), a pioneering series of twenty-eight engravings in which Birch was assisted by his son Thomas Birch, who also became a prominent painter. During an October 1805 visit to Washington, William Birch borrowed and drew a copy of Gilbert Stuart’s “Medallion” profile of TJ. At the 1811 exhibition of the Society of Artists of the United States, he showed a portrait of TJ in imitation bas-relief. Birch issued another set of twenty engravings, The Country Seats of the United States of North America (Springland Cot, 1808–09), and he exhibited his works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1811 and 1830. He moved back to Philadelphia in 1828 and died there (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; DNB description begins Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1901, 22 vols. description ends ; ODNB description begins H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, 60 vols. description ends ; Birch, “The Life of William Russell Birch, Enamel Painter,” 2 vols. [1927 typescript in PHi]; Cunningham, Image of Thomas Jefferson, 4–5, 92–5, 173; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 34 vols. description ends , 31:xlii–xliii, 576n; note to Benjamin Henry Latrobe to TJ, 19 May 1811; Philadelphia Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, 8 Aug. 1834).