John White Alexander
1865-1915
John White Alexander Galleries
Alexander was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now a part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Orphaned in infancy, he was reared by his grandparents and at the age of 12 became a telegraph boy in Pittsburgh. His talent at drawing attracted the attention of one of his employers, who assisted him to develop them. He moved to New York at the age of eighteen and worked in an office at Harper's Weekly, where he was an illustrator and political cartoonist at the same time that Abbey, Pennell, Pyle, and other celebrated illustrators labored there. After an apprenticeship of three years, he travelled to Munich for his first formal training. Owing to the lack of funds, he removed to the village of Polling, Bavaria, and worked with Frank Duveneck. They travelled to Venice, where he profited by the advice of Whistler, and then he continued his studies in Florence, the Netherlands, and Paris.
In 1881 he returned to New York and speedily achieved great success in portraiture, numbering among his sitters Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Walt Whitman, Henry G. Marquand, R. A. L. Stevenson, and president McCosh of Princeton University. His first exhibition in the Paris Salon of 1893 was a brilliant success and was followed by his immediate election to the Soci??t?? Nationale des Beaux Arts. Many additional honors were bestowed on him. In 1901 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1902 he became a member of the National Academy of Design. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the gold medals received by him were those of the Paris Exposition (1900) and the World's Fair at St. Louis (1904).
Many examples of his paintings are on display in museums and public places in the United States and in Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Butler Institute, and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. In addition, in the entrance hall to the Art Museum of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, a series of Alexander's murals entitled "Apotheosis of Pittsburgh" (1905-1907) covers the walls of the three-storey atrium area.
Alexander was married to Elizabeth Alexander Alexander, to whom he was introduced in part because of their shared last name. Elizabeth was the daughter of James Waddell Alexander, President of the Equitable Life Assurance Society at the time of the Hyde Ball scandal. The Alexanders had one child, the mathematician James Waddell Alexander II.
Alexander's original and highly individual art is based upon a very personal interpretation of humanity. He died in New York. Related Paintings of John White Alexander :. | Memories | Memories | Isabella and the Pot of Basil | florence nightingale and her sister parthenope. c | Mrs Daniels with Two Children | Related Artists: MASTER of Female Half-lengthDutch painter (active 1530-1540) Henri-Horace Roland de La PorteParis 1724-1793
French painter. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and was approved by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1761 as a 'painter of animals and fruit'. He presented his morceau de reception, the ambitious Vase of Lapis, Ornamented with Bronze and Placed near a Globe (Paris, Louvre), in 1763. This large painting is reminiscent of Oudry's work and depicts a collection of sumptuous objects against a simple cloth backdrop. Roland de la Porte's later works are much more intimate in scale and approach and depict simple rustic objects in a restrained yet realistic fashion in a manner akin to Chardin, for whose works his own have been mistaken. The Still-life with Bread and Fruit (Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen) is bathed in a warm light; the composition is unusual in that the bread, plums and preserve pot are represented at the viewer's eye level, obscuring the top of the table. The Little Orange Tree (Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) uses several devices similar to those used by Chardin: a light source comes from the upper left-hand side, throwing some of the surfaces into relief and highlighting them against the indistinct background; a single straw is brought into focus and seems to protrude out of the picture Max Buri1868-1915,Swiss painter. While still at school he was given drawing lessons by Paul Volmar (1832-1906) in Berne. From 1883 he was a pupil of Fritz Schider (1846-1907) in Basle, where he became acquainted with the works of Hans Holbein the younger and Arnold B?cklin. In 1886 he went to the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Munich, transferring in 1887 to Simon Holl?sy painting school. After seeing the works of the French Impressionists exhibited in Munich, he moved to the Acad?mie Julian in Paris in 1889. He made several journeys to Algeria, Holland, Belgium and England, and in 1893 he returned to Munich to study under Albert von Keller. In 1898 he settled in Switzerland, living first at Lucerne, then from 1903 in Brienz, near Interlaken. About 1900, influenced by the paintings of Ferdinand Hodler, Buri moved on from his early genre pictures, which were in mawkish shades of pink in the style of Keller and H?llosy, to achieve an individual style that brought him great popularity. He established his reputation with Village Politicians (1904; Basle, Kstmus.). He painted mainly the landscape and people of the Bernese Oberland, often depicting single figures and groups in front of bare indoor walls in realistic everyday scenes. The expressiveness of the compositions is achieved by clear contours and powerful clearly differentiated surfaces in local colours. Buri works are essentially populist rather than intellectual and avoid Hodler strict parallelism and Symbolist content.
|
|
|