John White Alexander - ADELSON GALLERIES, Inc

1. John White Alexander
The Garden Door, c. 1910-1915
Oil on canvas 22 x 14 inches

John White Alexander (1856-1915)
The Garden Door, c. 1910-1915
Oil on canvas
22 x 14 inches
Signed lower right: J.W. Alexander NA

Ex-collection:

Mr. and Mrs. M. J. McHenry, Newport, Rhode Island, c. 1930, until the present

John White Alexander began his career in New York at the age of eighteen at Harper's Weekly as an illustrator. In 1877, he went to Munich and attended classes at the Royal Academy. The academy was too rigid for him, and he moved to Polling, Upper Bavaria, where a group of American students were studying under Frank Duveneck. A year later, he traveled with "Duveneck's Boys" to Florence and Venice. Alexander did admire Duveneck's work, shared a studio with him in Florence, and taught some of Duveneck's art classes. While Alexander was in Venice, he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was most influential in the development of Alexander's painting. In 1881, Alexander returned to New York and became a successful portraitist while continuing his work at Harper's Weekly and teaching drawing at Princeton University. In 1890, he went with his wife and child to Paris, where they socialized with Whistler, Henry James, Stéphane Mallarmé, Auguste Rodin, Oscar Wilde, and Mrs. Jack Gardner. It was here that Alexander came into contact with the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, which influenced his characteristic style. His paintings of attenuated women, seen close up in serpentine poses became the hallmark of his work. He traveled back and forth between Paris and America and in 1901 returned to New York, where he was in great demand as a portrait painter. In 1905, he was commissioned to paint forty-eight murals for the new Carnegie Institute, a singular and highly profitable distinction. He was president of the National Academy of Design from 1909 until his death in 1915.

The subject matter of Alexander's paintings in the late 1890s was women either holding, arranging, or smelling flowers, which uses the Symbolist device of correspondence-that is, one sense recalling another, in this case the sense of smell being evoked visually. Although Alexander, for the rest of his career, incorporated these influences into his work, he eventually moved away from his attenuated Art Nouveau figures. The Ring (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Her Birthday (private collection), and June (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) are all depictions of events in his life; they are less stylized and not meant as portraits. The Garden Door is part of this late genre of painting, depicting a scene the artist no doubt witnessed and recorded directly.