Died on 01 June 1915: John White Alexander, US artist born on 07 October 1856.
— American painter and illustrator. He began his career in New York in 1875 as a political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. In 1877 he went to Paris for his first formal art training, and then to Munich, where he enrolled at the Kunstakademie under Gyuala Benczúr. In 1878 he joined a colony of American painters established by Frank Duveneck (09 Oct 1848 – 03 Jan 1919) in Polling, Bavaria. In 1879 they travelled to Italy, where Alexander formed friendships with James McNeill Whistler (14 Jul 1834 – 17 Jul 1903) and Henry James [portrait by Sargent, 1913]. In 1881 he returned to New York, working as an illustrator for Harper’s, as a drawing instructor at Princeton and as a highly successful society portrait painter. He also exhibited at the National Academy of Design. By 1893 his reputation in both Europe and America had soared, and in 1895 he was awarded a prestigious commission for a series of murals entitled The Evolution of the Book in the newly established Library of Congress in Washington, DC. After 1901 Alexander became deeply involved with the promotion of the arts in America. He won numerous mural commissions and continued to paint portraits
      Alexander’s stylistic development falls into several distinct stages. His early landscapes and genre scenes of the 1870s bear the stamp of the Munich realism of Wilhelm Leibl (23 Oct 1844 – 04 Dec 1900) as espoused by Duveneck and William Merritt Chase (01 Nov 1849 – 25 Oct 1916). His fluid brushwork resembled that of Frans Hals (1582 — 01 Sep 1666) and Diego Velázquez (06 Jun 1599 – 06 Aug 1660), painters he deeply admired. After his return to the USA in 1881 and under the influence of Whistler, he favored a more limited palette and experimented with the evocation of mood through shadow and gesture. His portrait of Walt Whitman (1887) is one of his finest works of the 1880s.
      Many of Alexander's later portraits, notably of women, were psychological studies rather than specific likenesses, as in The Ring (1911). His brushwork became less painterly and more concerned with suggesting abstracted shapes. He also adopted a very coarse-weave canvas, the texture of which became an important element in his mature work. By applying thinned-down paint to the absorbent surface, his pictures appear to have been dyed in muted tones, in marked contrast to the glossy, impasted surfaces of his earlier work. Throughout his career Alexander favored compositions with a single figure placed against a sharply contrasting background. The sinuous curvilinear outline of the heroine standing full~length in Isabella, or the Pot of Basil evokes contemporary Art Nouveau forms. Like the Symbolists, he sought by gesture and strong lighting to intensify the viewer’s response to his sensuous treatment of the subject.
— LINKS
— Lady in a Pink Dress — Aletheia (1895; 161x133cm)
— Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1897; 192x91cm) _ This painting is based on Isabella, or the Pot of Basil  by John Keats.
— A Ray of Sunlight (1898; 122x88cm) — Memories (1903) — Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1897) — Mrs. Daniels with Two Children (1913)