International studio (34.1908)

John IV. Alexander

or woman, so the personage approximates his
idea of the composition, and who shall complain?
But your portrait painter may not vary perceptibly
from his theme without grave complications. He
must satisfy sitter, family, friends, even acquaint-
ances, and do one work after another whether the
sitter be congenial or no, whether the sitter be
paintable or the reverse, and he must draw and
construct, construct and draw, and be sure of his
result—of a certain result at any rate, or he is a
failure. Be it understood, of course, that I am
referring to the portrait painter of the first class.
Obviously, some sitters appeal more to a painter
than others, and then it is that he reaches higher
flights, and Mr. Alexander is no exception; but
there are few who are as uniformly excellent as he
is, few who reach such excellence along varying
lines. He paints both youth and old age equally
well, getting the joyousness of the one and the
dignity of the other, the vivaciousness of the first,
the tranquillity of the latter, and whether the subject
is adolescence, young womanhood or maturity, his
brush seems to differentiate superbly. And as I
write, I have in my mind his Child with Doll; his
Mrs. Hastings, and that delicious idyll of old age,
his canvas of Mrs. Wheaton, shown recently at the
Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
But we have the virility of exuberant manhood
in his portrait of his brother painter, the lamented
Fitz Thaulow; the strong type of the thinker in
riper years, Walt Whitman, and his able likeness of
the scholar, Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, while for a
dashing canvas of young manhood, the portrait of
Mr. Alexander’s son, a lad of twenty, moves one to
enthusiasm. As if to prove his art to have a strong
imaginative side, full of psychological interest, one
may turn to such poetic works as his Pandora,
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, the Autumn, and,
lastly, to his recently completed mural decorations
for the new Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, a work
of such proportions and mechanical difficulties
overcome as almost to stagger one. Here are
many square feet of wall space covered with
allegorical figures, showing the apotheosis of the
wealth and industries of the Smoky City, ably con-
ceived and dexterously wrought out, panel after
panel of grimy workmen, of artisans and laborers
at furnaces, on trestles, at forges, or in mines, and
larger compositions of the nations of the earth
paying tribute to the enterprise of the steel town at
the conflux of the rivers.
Curious lighting, swirling robes, unusual poses
of the figure, color schemes of daring and charm,
all these are among the salient characteristics of

Mr. Alexander’s work. No one seems to treat a
gown just as he does, no one seems to get quite the
postures he evolves for his women, without affecta-
tion and without straining. Take his Pot of Basil.
It is a harmony of line, a poem of chiaroscuro, a thing
of rare invention. No one had previously conceived
a Pandora such as that of Mr. Alexander’s, with its
mysterious effect of light and shade, its superb
womanhood, the physical combined with the
poetic. Through all his efforts one never regrets
the years the man spent in illustrative work on the
magazines, years of excessive toil and many dis-
couragements, where he learned the theory of
composition so well, and gained, perhaps, a self-
reliance and a capacity to carry out his ideas to a
logical conclusion. Association at the establish-
ment of the Harper Brothers with Edwin A. Abbey,
the late Charles Stanley Reinhart and others was
obviously of advantage to him and the thoroughness
of the German school at Munich later tells in all his
subsequent work.
Mr. Alexander is known to the world generally
by his figure work, but I have seen in his home
lovely landscapes and sea pictures of such delicate
color and pictorial charm as to make me regret his
infrequent ventures into such fields. These are
executed with the same abiding simplicity and
grand sweeps of the brush that characterize his
figures, each stroke full of meaning, the scene
rendered rather in the abstract than in the concrete
and replete with significance. Indeed, Mr. Alex-
ander does not put his brush to canvas without
evolving something out of the commonplace and
invariably is he supremely artistic. His medals
and decorations are many, for few art societies have
escaped giving him recompenses, and his paintings
are in many museums both at home and abroad.
Happily, however, none of these things affect his
art or the man personally, for he has his own con-
victions of his duty, and his own serious require-
ments for himself. His advance has been con-
sistent and logical, for he is unswayed by either
praise or blame, working out his own theories ac-
cording to his own ideas.
When one is inclined to associate Mr. Alexander’s
art with the portrayal of the evanescent charm of
girlhood or the more lasting qualities of the young
matron, there comes up the recollection of such a
virile performance as his rendition of the sculptor
Auguste Rodin, a canvas so strong, so straight-
forward and so full of genuine feeling for the in-
tellectuality of man that one is puzzled to say just
where he is at his best. This Rodin is one of the
distinguished portraits of recent years.

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