While in Florence he supported himself by sending drawings to the Harper publications and teaching a class of students; but he soon realized that he was holding back his own progress by such work, and in 1881 he decided to return to America. Arrived at Pittsburgh, he made a trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi with Fred Muller to illustrate an article on “King Coal’s Highway.” The article appeared in Harper’s Monthly for January, 1882. The illustrations were realistic enough, but not remarkable in any way. They created no furor. Alexander came on shortly thereafter to New York, took a studio in the German Bank Building, at Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and soon was doing a portrait of a little daughter of Henry Harper. He moved to the Chelsea Studios in Twenty-third Street, continued with portraiture, and became interested in the art movements of the time. People looked upon him as a young man of ability. He had not Chase’s vogue but he, nevertheless, had his group of admirers.
In 1881 he was in Spain and Morocco, and in 1886 he went to England for the Century Magazine, having been commissioned to do certain portraits of literary men—George Bancroft, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson. He did Stevenson at Bournemouth, stopping with him while sketching him. He also did Austin Dobson, and went to Ireland to draw some illustrations for articles by Charles de Kay. The portraits were apparently sketches in charcoal and gave only a summary of the heads. They were well done and rightly emphasized for reproduction. The illustrations for the Ireland articles were decidedly good in the landscapes—something for which Alexander had a talent, but which he never cared to follow up until late in life and then apparently for his own pleasure. This work and, in fact, that of the next half-dozen years did not bring Alexander into any great prominence in America. He had not found himself—he had not “arrived” in a large sense.
Up to 1890 his work had hardly so much as suggested his later bent or method. The “Head of a Boy” and “Sketch of a Boy,” shown in a recent memorial exhibition at the Century Club, are both of them early efforts done at Polling. They are in the dark Munich style of Duveneck and not unlike things that Shirlaw and Chase were doing a few years earlier. “Old Cole” in the same exhibition, done in 1881, again indicates Munich teaching. The lights are surrounded by darks and the darks are darkened by bitumen. There is no attempt at fine color or decorative pattern, but rather a desire for the realistic largeness of the model with a resultant brusque modelling and some dragging of a heavily loaded brush. The portrait of “Thurlow Weed” gives a big strong head relieved by being in high light and again surrounded by darks. One might think from a casual glance that it had been inspired by Lenbach. The portrait of “Jefferson as Bob Acres,” while it still shows Munich methods, is something of a departure. It is a costume and footlight portrait with the lights very high, the shadows pronounced, the color very gay. It was well set, well drawn, easily painted upon ordinary canvas, and in the usual oil medium. The portrait had spirit and life about it and yet gave small indication of what Alexander’s style would ultimately become. Just so with the rather fine portrait of “Walt Whitman,” now in the Metropolitan Museum. The hark back to Lenbach in the insistent relief of the head and hands as spots of white surrounded by dark is quite apparent. Perhaps here there is a pose of the figure and a sweep of the beard that suggest Alexander’s later swing and swirl of lines, but it is not very marked.
This work, done for the most part before he was thirty, was talked about and praised in New York art circles, but it was really Paris that gave Alexander rank. He had been married in 1887 to Miss Elizabeth Alexander, and in 1890 they went abroad for a few months that he might recuperate from an attack of the grippe. They remained away eleven years. The time was spent chiefly in Paris, and it was to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts that he sent, in 1893, three portraits that made a decided hit. They were entitled “Portrait Gris,” “Portrait Noir,” and “Portrait Jaune.” The titles suggest color schemes, qualities of tone, garments arranged gracefully to fill space and make a decorative pattern—in short, the things that thereafter gave individuality to Alexander’s art. Paris immediately took notice of them; the Société elected him an associate member, and the next year, when he sent a panel of five portraits, he was elected a full member. His reputation and his commissions from that time increased rapidly. He was a success.
Alexander has been called “the most Parisian of the Americans,” and yet just why one hardly knows. His refined taste, his sensitiveness, his animation are less French than American, and it must be his method that suggests Paris. But whom in Paris? What painter can you point to as the original or even the inspiration of his style? Carrière, Besnard, La Touche—you think of them only to dismiss them from mind. Whistler, Albert Moore, Burne-Jones, the Japanese, afford little clew. Perhaps the obvious explanation is that Alexander merely followed his own inclination and developed a method and a style quite his own. Others have done so before him and why not he? Very likely some one suggested a coarse absorbent canvas with thin petroleum or turpentine as a medium, or he may have seen the results obtained by such materials in pictures at the Salon or elsewhere. Paris has always been replete with new mediums and methods and has had its generations of painters who could do no more with the new than with the old. But Alexander’s painting was something more than an absorbent canvas. He had an original point of view and the new materials merely helped him to reveal it.
Perhaps his originality grew out of many observations and developed from many sources. Duveneck in the realistic and Whistler with the decorative each had their day and sway with him. Something of the Japanese becomes apparent in a flattening of the canvas, in elimination of non-essential features, in gaining a sketchy effect by filling in large spaces with flat tones and throwing emphasis upon salient points of high light and color. Finally comes an unusual employment of dress in making a pattern of swirling lines which not only contrast with the angles of the canvas but lend movement and life to the figure. The use of drapery for line effect is, of course, apparent all through art. Alexander may have taken suggestions regarding this from Greek marbles or Italian pictures or Pre-Raphaelite glass. But so vague and shadowy are all these sources of influence that one cannot trace them home. Such pictures as “The Green Gown,” “A Rose,” “The Gossip,” “The Ring,” have no counterpart in any painting, ancient or modern. One comes back again to a former conclusion that they are Alexander’s own creations—his distinct contribution to art.
How far does the contribution carry? Well, little farther than the decorative face of the canvas. The handsome, well-gowned, and well-bred young woman who holds the rose or ring or bowl is only part of a color pattern on the canvas. She does not symbolize or signify much of anything beyond that. You could not guess if she has a brain or a heart or a soul. She is not a document or a problem or even a character. Alexander did not believe that painting was a means of epitomizing abstract ideas but merely a way of revealing graceful color patterns that please the eye and hang harmoniously upon the wall. There is nothing intensive or dramatic or even narrative about his work. It is not sentimental or emotional or passion-strung. A late canvas like that entitled “Husband, Wife, and Child” may suggest sentiment, but only as a superfluity. The painter meant to stop with the completed pattern.
Almost always the pattern is agreeable and sufficient in itself as art. The space is happily filled with one figure, sometimes two, but seldom more. The linear design meets the upright of the frame with flowing lines in which repetition plays more of a part than contrast. “The Blue Bowl” is a good illustration. The figure is placed diagonally upon the canvas, the bowl lines are repeated in the head and shoulders, the dress is spread in fan-like lines toward the far corner of the canvas. The whole design is unusual and extraordinary but very graceful. So, too, with “The Ring,” in the Metropolitan Museum, where a young woman seated on a lounge with a large straw hat in her lap is holding up a ring for admiration. The round hat somehow suggests a repetition of the round head, and the dress lines repeat its curves. Great care is taken with the linear arrangements of all these single figures. The composition is carefully thought out, wrought out, brought out.
“The Ring,” by John W. Alexander.