Laura reportedly had a great interest in the Bedford art collection at Woburn and, as an amateur portraitist, copied a number of paintings in it, mainly of Russell family members. Having accompanied her husband on constituency business to Tavistock, where a new town hall had been opened in 1864, she reportedly noted the bareness of the walls and presented eight of her copies to adorn them, as well as painting two original portraits for it: of Sir John Salusbury Trelawny who had been one of the two Tavistock members, 1843–1852 and 1857–1865, and George Henry Charles Byng, 3rd Earl of Strafford, who had been MP between 1852 and 1857. These ten pictures – which include one of the seventeenth-century Puritan MP, John Pym, and of Sir Francis Drake – are still there. Only the Pym and Drake portraits are dated, 1866 and 1867: none are of high quality or in good condition. Her rather better original portrait of the German translator, Sarah Austin (1793–1867) was a gift from her to the National Portrait Gallery in 1879, shortly after it opened.

Her own portrait, in the form of a copy by Jane Hawkins after George Frederick Watts, is also at Tavistock. Watts painted the original in 1872 and exhibited it as Lady Arthur Russell at the Royal Academy in 1874. There is an early photograph of it by Frederic Hollyer (1838–1933) in the Watts Gallery at Compton (COMWG2007.702) but separate from its unillustrated entry in the register of Watts’s work compiled by his second wife, Mary. Wilfred Blunt, former curator there, later added a note in the register that it was inherited by ‘Miss Russell of Albury’ (i.e. the sitter’s daughter Flora). There is no record of it being exhibited since 1874 and it may still be in family hands.

The Russells were attractive high-society figures, whose London home at 2 Audley Square, Mayfair, was centre for a circle of notable literary and artistic friends. In 1921 Flora Russell, who inherited it, sold it to become new premises for the University Women’s Club (est. 1883), as it remains today.