John White Alexander Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, he became a prominent figure and portrait painter and muralist in New York during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is especially noted for female subjects, which he rendered with fluid, sweeping lines and "an almost abstract, decorative rhythm of shape with a graceful and voluptuous expressiveness" (Baigell "Dictionary" 8). He worked as a telegraph messenger boy but soon was discovered as a talented illustrator. He worked for "Harper's Weekly" and found fertile subject matter in the 1877 Pittsburgh strike. He traveled in Europe with Frank Duveneck and in Venice became acquainted with the Tonalist style of painting through James McNeill Whistler. In the 1890s in Paris, he did some of his most powerful and imaginative work, including a number of portraits. Among his circle of friends were Oscar Wilde, Henry James, James Whistler, Auguste Rodin and Andre Gide. For "Harpers" and "Century Magazine," he sent his portraits of European dignitaries, and in 1901, settled in New York to become a portrait painter of scores of prominent people. He also did mural commissions including one for the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, which to that time was the largest mural ever painted by an American. In 1894, he was voted a member of the Societe National des Beaux Arts and in 1901 was made Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government. In New York, he served as President of the National Academy of Design.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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