JOHN WHITE ALEXANDER PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY
JOHN WHITE ALEXANDER
American, 1856-1915
BIOGRAPHY
John White Alexander was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania and orphaned at an early age. “He was raised by his grandparents and later adopted by Edward Jay Allen, president of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, where young Alexander worked from the age of twelve. In 1875, he went to New York and worked as a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly. In the summer of 1877 he sailed for Europe, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy in Munich and studied under Julius Benczur. From 1878 until his return in 1881, Alexander worked with Frank Duveneck and a group of American students, first in the Bavarian village of Polling and later in Florence and Venice. The landscapes and unpretentious portraits of local people that he painted in Polling owe a great deal to the impasto techniques that Duveneck developed under the influence of the German realist Wilhelm Leibl. In Venice, however, Alexander met James McNeil Whistler, whose delicate brushwork and thin paint surfaces he adopted. Over the next two decades the artists became close friends.
“On his return to New York, Alexander again did illustrations for Harper's and painted a number of portraits. He went West in 1883 to sketch and paint watercolors. The next year, after a sketching tour of North Africa, he visited Spain to study the paintings of Velazquez in Madrid. In London in 1886 he did a series of portraits of famous Americans living abroad, among which is a charcoal drawing of Whistler [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]. Returning home the following year he married Elizabeth Alexander, a writer whose short stories he later illustrated. In 1891 they settled in Paris, and for the next decade, Alexander was a prominent member of the international community there. His circle of friends included Octave Mirabeau, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Auguste Rodin, and Whistler, all of whom made this a period of great stimulation for him.
“Throughout the 1890s, Alexander's paintings show Whistler's influence in the manipulation of line and color to enhance expressive qualities. He exhibited a group of his interpretive figure studies at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1893 and thereafter contributed his work to many exhibitions, not only in Paris, but with secession groups in Munich and Vienna. Perhaps the most fully developed example of his Parisian style is Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1897 [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston], in which he combines sensuous flowing lines and harsh theatrical lighting to create an image not unlike those of the symbolists.
“In Paris, Alexander maintained contact with developments in America, serving as head of the jury to select works for the 1897 Carnegie International Exhibition. On his return to New York in 1901, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, where he became an academician the following year. He was commissioned in 1905 to execute an ambitious mural depicting The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh for the staircase hall of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, but the project remained unfinished at his death. Throughout this period, Alexander’s portraits and figure studies continue to show the influence of his Parisian experiments… Between 1909 and his death in 1915, Aexander was president of the National Academy and an ex-officio trustee of the Metropolitan Museum.”
[Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1980, vol. III, pp. 207-8]
Museum and Public Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Century Association, New York, NY
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH
Colony Club, New York, NY
Columbia University Club, New York, NY
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Knickerbocker Club, New York, NY
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
New York Public Library, New York, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
University Club, New York, NY
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT
Wheaton College, Norton, MA
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
