JOHN WHITE ALEXANDER 1856-1915
Portrait of a Lady, 1900
Oil on unsized jute canvas, 40 X 22" (101.60 X 55.88 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 920-0-102

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, American art's internationalism and cosmopolitanism, perhaps its most characteristic features, were fostered by a generation of artists who sought foreign training, self-consciously reveling in their art's very lack of "Americanness." Their increased attention to formal issues, with little regard to subject matter, realism, or national expression, contrasted with ante-bellum concerns grounded in native subject matter and narrative. John White Alexander developed and flourished during this period. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, Alexander's early interest in drawing led him to New York in 1875, where he worked as an illustrator for Harper Brothers. In 1877, he sailed for Europe and, after a brief stop in Paris, enrolled at the Munich Royal Academy studio of the Hungarian artist Gyula Benczur. In 1878, he joined the circle of artists working around Frank Duveneck in P61fing, Bavaria, and later in Venice and Florence. Upon his return to New York in 1881, Alexander began his career as a portraitist, gaining public recognition almost immediately after his first participation in exhibitions.
Alexander moved to Paris in 1891 and remained there for a decade, rising to the forefront of American expatriate painters and achieving international recognition. His participation in the annual Paris salons of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, beginning in 1893, signaled his direct and vital involvement with several international art organizations and exhibitions including the Carnegie International Exhibition, the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, London, and the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. Upon his return in 1901, Alexander became increasingly involved in the development and promotion of American art, culminating in his presidency of the National Academy of Design from 1909 until shortly before his death in 1915.
Portrait of a Lady was painted during Alexander's expatriate period, during which time decorative figure paintings of women dominated his work. Portrait of a Lady is characterized by a simplification and flattening of form through surface patterning, elegant linear contours, asymmetrical composition, and a restricted, low-keyed palette with a single dominant tone. Influenced by the pervasive example of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, champion of art-for-art's sake, Alexander's painting from the 1890s asserts the decorative potential of figure painting whose primary impulse is aesthetic and formal rather than referential or representational. The generic title of the work and the aversion of the woman's face from the viewer further underscore Alexander's interest in decorative arrangement and design at the expense of verisimilitude, which had been among his primary concerns in male portraiture from the 1880s. This gender distinction-the overtly decorative treatment of female figures emphasizing surface design at the expense of realistic details, in contrast to a depiction of men emphasizing character and physical likeness with only incidental decoration-paralleled internationally current trends.

SARAH J. MOORE