In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Just as important as the design is the color scheme. It is, in fact, so prominent that the title of the picture is often derived from it. “The Green Gown” or “The Blue Bowl” are hints that green or blue is the key in which the picture is pitched. The continuance or repetition or perhaps slight variance of the green or blue runs through the whole picture and produces what is called a tone or harmony or symphony in green or blue. The aim with Alexander is precisely as with Whistler. Neither of them harps on the one note to the exclusion of every other, but the one note nevertheless prevails throughout. The picture by Alexander called “The Rose” shows a young girl in dull green which would be monotonous if insisted upon everywhere. It is relieved by the pink of the flesh, the dark hair, the white linen, but above all by the rose which the girl holds in her hand. The rose hue is in the same tone of light as the green and emphasizes the latter because red is the complementary color of green.
The appearance of complementary or slightly varying colors in the central high lights argues the prevalence of a large half-tone in the background and intermediate spaces. This half-tone when prepared in a thin medium like petroleum and used upon a soft or absorbent canvas sinks into the canvas, becomes an atmospheric depth, becomes vague, indefinite, mysterious. To avoid too much monotony of half-tone Alexander very often introduced a burst of light upon the figure. This sounds like the old Rembrandt-Lenbach formula which he followed in his early student days at Munich, but his later practice diffused the illumination, made it less hard on the edges, and more atmospheric. Even in certain pictures where a ray of sunshine is shot into a dark room through an unlatched door the ray is not hard and the half-tone gives it an atmospheric setting quite extraordinary.
Under these peculiar conditions of canvas, of tone, of illumination, the drawing is often flattened, even abbreviated. The heads and costumes are brushed in broadly, the hands are sometimes passed over with a mere suggestion of form or value, the accessories are still more vague in line, in bulk, in texture. Nothing but things of vital importance are given. By suppression of the parts the painter gets concentration on certain salient features of surface, or light or color. With thin painting in the ground and shadows and fat painting in the high lights the picture takes on the look of a large and easily done sketch. A feeling of freedom, of spontaneity, is apparent, and with it life, spirit, gusto in the recital.
There was more or less variation of this sketch-appearance in all Alexander’s late canvases. Sometimes he drew with sharper edges and more protrusive modelling and produced a more realistic effect; but far oftener he gave merely a suggestion of form or created an atmospheric nimbus with his tone that surrounded and enveloped the figure. It has been frequently noted in these pages that almost every painter oscillates between too much drawing and not enough. When Alexander dismissed his form rather summarily for a tone or a texture, his critics declared him vague, shadowy, merely decorative; when he insisted upon the drawing and perhaps minimized his tone, he was declared prosaic. He did not have to be told that he was between the devil and the deep sea. Every painter knows it, or comes to know it, before he has struggled through many canvases.
A more frequent comment on Alexander was that he was a painter of attitudes and draperies—nature plus a pose. To avoid the conventional he chose the accidental and the momentary rather than the characteristic or permanent. He was seeking the decorative, and his girl in green or gray or yellow was just a little more elegantly disposed than in nature. It was frankly an “arrangement”—a placing of the figure and a disposition of the accessories to the best advantage. The robes were swung in gracefully with no sharp angle lines or crabbed pothooks to break the flow. The photographer of to-day seeks to produce the same graceful exaggeration but with less success. And the realist who depicts the charwoman bending over the ash-barrel usually exaggerates more positively the other way. If the beauty of the ugly in an awkward pose may be accounted art, why not the beauty of the charming in a graceful pose? Alexander got what he could out of his handsome model, making her a little more graceful than reality, to be sure, but did not Van Dyck, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, do the same thing with marked success?
His portrait sitters differed from his abstract types holding a ring or a blue bowl or a rose chiefly in the matter of a facial likeness. The “arrangement” was carried out with the one as with the other, though it was usually not so conspicuous in the portrait as in the type. Perhaps because the costume and coloring of women were more adaptable to the “arrangement” than the costume and coloring of men, the painter achieved the reputation of being more successful with the former as sitters than with the latter. Certainly in his most attractive portraits of women he has not failed to use graceful composition, and has gotten much pictorial effect out of his color, tone, and light. The “Mrs. Hastings,” for instance, is both portrait and picture. It is expectant in look and lively in spirit. The pose in profile, which is repeated vaguely in the Winged Victory back of the figure, is complemented by a color and a tone quite in keeping. It is one of the painter’s best efforts. The “Mrs. Duryea” is perhaps a little more conscious in its formality. The space is not so well filled and the dress spreads too obviously. With the “Mrs. Ledyard Blair” the dress again spreads for decorative effect and becomes pronounced in importance. A similar result is apparent in the portrait known as the “Woman in Gray” now in the Luxembourg. All of these last-mentioned portraits have excellences quite aside from their decorative planning, and the “Woman in Gray” had much to do in creating Alexander’s vogue in Paris; but one turns from them to the refined simplicity of the “Miss Dorothy Roosevelt” with some relief. Sometimes nature is not the better for being “arranged.”
When it was necessary to insist upon characterization Alexander could do it, and do it well. The “Mrs. Wheaton,” an old lady with gray hair and lace cap, done in 1904, is excellent in its gentle (not brutal) realization of the model. It is quite in the class with the Whistler and Chase mother portraits, and in refinement is perhaps superior to either of the others. The children canvases of “Eleanor Alexander” with the doll in the chair or “Geraldine Russell” standing at full length are equally good.
It is true enough that the grace and charm belonging to women and children seemed to appeal to Alexander more than the sturdier qualities of men. He painted many men but they were not always as forceful as the “Fritz Thaulow.” That figure has bulk and body to it but again no brutality. It is more forceful than the “Walt Whitman,” which is just a little too much ironed out and smoothed down for the vociferous original. The beard and hair and soi-disant look are those of a poet rather than Whitman—a distinction with a difference to some people. The “Dr. Patton” in academic robes as president of Princeton is probably as satisfactory as any of Alexander’s portraits of men. It is a simple, well-drawn, convincing presentation, not surprising in any way nor again falling short in any way.
All of this work is simple, large in design, not confused with detail or small objects, and always with ample breathing room. Alexander attempted no elaborate grouping or historical composition except in his designs for mural decoration. The earlier pictures such as “Pandora” and “The Pot of Basil” are merely single figures. “The Piano” is a single figure with a piano, the “Memories” is two figures, as is also the “Music Panel.” They are all spacious and do not crowd the canvas or the frame. Occasionally he did landscapes—some of them up in the hills about Cornish, New Hampshire—in which there is the same simplicity of design and feeling of space in hillside, valley, and sky. His landscapes have a decorative swing of line similar in kind to his figure pictures, and there is something of the same tonal effect, though less pronounced. In other words, the painter saw or read the decorative into landscape as into figures, which may be considered a mistake if one is looking for a realistic presentation, but is just as certainly a success if one is looking for something to hang upon the wall that shall not clash with every other object in the room.