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 | Gray Portrait (The Lady in Gray) (mk06) | Miss Helen Manice | The Crowning of Labor | Memories |
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Salvator Rosa
1615-1673 Italian Salvator Rosa Galleries Salvatore Rosa (1615 - March 15, 1673) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic. His life and writings were equally colorful. He continued apprenticeship with Falcone, helping him complete his battlepiece canvases. In that studio, it is said that Lanfranco took notice of his work, and advised him to relocate to Rome, where he stayed from 1634-6. Returning to Naples, he began painting haunting landscapes, overgrown with vegetation, or jagged beaches, mountains, and caves. Rosa was among the first to paint "romantic" landscapes, with a special turn for scenes of picturesque often turbulent and rugged scenes peopled with shepherds, brigands, seamen, soldiers. These early landscapes were sold cheaply through private dealers. This class of paintings peculiarly suited him. He returned to Rome in 1638-39, where he was housed by Cardinal Francesco Maria Brancaccio, bishop of Viterbo. For the Chiesa Santa Maria della Morte in Viterbo, Rosa painted his first and one of his few altarpieces with an Incredulity of Thomas. While Rosa had a facile genius at painting, he pursued a wide variety of arts: music, poetry, writing, etching, and acting. In Rome, he befriended Pietro Testa and Claude Lorraine. During a Roman carnival play he wrote and acted in a masque, in which his character bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. In costume, he inveighed against the farcical comedies acted in the Trastevere under the direction of Bernini. While his plays were successful, this also gained him powerful enemies among patrons and artists, including Bernini himself, in Rome. By late 1639, he had had to relocate to Florence, where he stayed for 8 years. He had been in part, invited by a Cardinal Giancarlo de Medici. Once there, Rosa sponsored a combination of studio and salon of poets, playwrights, and painters --the so called Accademia dei Percossi ("Academy of the Stricken"). To the rigid art milieu of Florence, he introduced his canvases of wild landscapes; while influential, he gathered few true pupils. Another painter poet, Lorenzo Lippi, shared with Rosa the hospitality of the cardinal and the same circle of friends. Lippi encouraged him to proceed with the poem Il Malmantile Racquistato. He was well acquainted also with Ugo and Giulio Maffei, and housed with them in Volterra, where he wrote four satires Music, Poetry, Painting and War. About the same time he painted his own portrait, now in the National Gallery, London.
William George Richardson
artist (b at Nottingham, Eng 12 June 1833; d at Sussex, NB 18 Nov 1889)
Francis Nicholson
English Painter, 1753-1844 English painter. After studying with a local artist in Scarborough, Nicholson began his career in his native Pickering, producing sporting pictures and portraits for Yorkshire patrons. In the mid-1780s a sideline in portraits of country houses led him to concentrate on landscapes in watercolour. From 1789 he contributed views of Yorkshire and Scotland to exhibitions at the Royal Academy. He also supplied topographical views for the Copper Plate Magazine. Although his market increasingly became London-based, Nicholson continued to live in Yorkshire (at Whitby, Knaresborough and Ripon), only moving to London c. 1803.