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About John White Alexander
An orphan, raised by his grandparents, John White Alexander began his journey as an artist at Harper’s Weekly, first as an office boy then as an illustrator. In Munich he associated with the "Duveneck Boys" and met Henry James and James Abbott McNeill Whistler when the group summered in Venice. Duveneck was so pleased with Alexander that he allowed him to teach a few of his classes. Following travels from New Orleans to North Africa, Alexander found himself back in Europe; he established himself in Paris in 1890, at the beginning of his busiest decade. The painter and his wife entertained the following celebrities at their apartment: the naturalist author Octave Mirabeau, Rodin, Oscar Wilde, the Symbolist poet Mallarmé, André Gide, and Joseph Pennell. Alexander exhibited at the "new" Paris Salon, organized by the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, in 1893, which immediately allied him with the progressives. Two years later he became a full member of the Société and received a mural commission for the Library of Congress.
In 1897 Alexander painted his most Symbolist work, Isabella and the Pot of Basil (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which was based on William Holman Hunt’s version dated 1867. Both take a poem by Keats as their subject. Other than this, Alexander was not too concerned with subject matter, for he followed Whistler and the "Art for Art’s Sake" premise that a painting was foremost a pleasing arrangement of decorative forms. Alexander specialized in full-length figure paintings of women in flowing gowns and his elegant sweeping lines reflect elements of Art Nouveau. From Whistler, Alexander adapted a limited use of muted color, subtle, thin brushwork through which the weave of the canvas is apparent, and the practice of giving aesthetic titles to paintings, such as Study in Tone, Etude and The Yellow Girl. Alexander’s oeuvre, besides mural decoration, could be divided between portraits and intimist scenes.
Study in Black and Green is a study for the larger version in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (50 x 40 inches), formerly owned by George A. Hearn, the generous collector who was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum the last decade of his life (1903-13). The painting was purchased out of the Hearn Fund in 1908, the year in which Alexander was named President of the National Academy of Design. Arthur Hoeber found the work to have "a charming disposition of light and shade [and] an abiding sense of the decorative. . . ." Alexander set the model at a slight diagonal, typically, she is seated by a window. Naturally certain areas of the sketch have not been worked out, the lower right, for example. And details are more subtle in the final version. By 1906 Alexander had turned from his thinly applied paint surfaces of the 1890s to more bravura brushwork. Many American painters, including Alexander, focused on universal or ideal women in interiors, "personifications of a ‘poetic sensitivity’ . . . embodiments of beauty as well as nobility of spirit."
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Paintings by John White Alexander
| Study for Woman in Black and Green |
| oil on canvas:30 x 25 inches |
| unsigned |
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