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55
JOHN WHITE ALEXANDER
American, 1856-1915
Her Birthday, 1913
oil on canvas
signed and dated center left "John W. Alexander / 1913"
79 3/4 x 64 3/4 in. (202.6 x 164.5 cm.), Frame: 90 1/2 x 76 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (229.9 x 193.7 x 5.7 cm.)
- Provenance: Elizabeth A. Alexander, the artist's wife, 1915; James Waddell Alexander, Jr., their son, 1947; Irina A. Reed, 1971; Graham Gallery, New York, circa 1980; Private Collection, Los Angeles, since 1985
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Exhibited: Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago, "Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Twenty-Sixth Annual Exhibition", November 14 - December 25, 1913, no. 3;
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, "The Carnegie Institute, Eighteenth Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute, (International)", April 30 - June 30, 1914, no. 5, illus.; Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, "43 Paintings by American and European Artists Selected from Carnegie Institute International Exhibition", July 15 - August 9, 1914; Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum, "Select Group of Paintings from the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition", August 16 - September 27, 1914, no. 2; Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Museum of Art, "50 Paintings by European and American Artists Selected from the Carnegie Institute", October 1914; Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, "43 Paintings from International Exhibition", November 1914; Lincoln, Nebraska, Nebraska Art Association, "Twenty First Annual Exhibition", Carnegie International Exhibition, December 1-21, 1914, p. 10, no. 2; Indianapolis, Indiana, Herron Art Institute, "Paintings from the International Exhibition at Carnegie Institute", January 1-27, 1915; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, "41 Paintings from the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition", February 10-28, 1915; Buffalo, New York, Fine Arts Academy, "41 Paintings from the 1914 Exhibition of Carnegie Institute", March 6 - April 4, 1915; Rochester, New York, The Memorial Art Gallery, "Paintings Selected from the International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute Pittsburgh", April 9-28, 1915, no. 2; St. Louis, Missouri, City Art Museum, "Paintings from the Carnegie Institute", May 11, 1915; New York, New York, Graham Gallery, "John White Alexander 1856-1915: Correspondences", October 30-December 14, 1985, p. 9, no. 19. - Literature: "Catalogue of Paintings John White Alexander Memorial Exhibition", Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Department of Fine Arts, March 1916, p. 60; Homer Saint-Gaudens, "John W. Alexander in the Theatre," The American Magazine of Art, vol. VII, no. 9 (July 1916), p. 371, illus.; Isabel Stevenson Monro and Kate M. Monro, "Index to Reproductions of American Paintings: A Guide to Pictures Occurring in More than Eight Hundred Books", (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1948), p. 40; Sarah J. Moore, "John White Alexander (1856-1915): In Search of the Decorative", PhD, City University of New York, 1992, pp. 351-352; 507, fig. 118; Mary Anne Goley, "John White Alexander, An American Artist in the Gilded Age" (London: PWP Publishers, 2018), p. 197; 199; 226-227; 246, fig. 90, illus.
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Notes: We are grateful to Mary Anne Goley, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of John White Alexander, for her assistance cataloging this lot.
An accomplished muralist and portrait painter, John White Alexander was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. In 1875, the young artist moved to New York City, where he began his career as a political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper's Weekly. There, he worked closely with Edwin Austin Abbey and Charles Dana Gibson, each of whom enjoyed successful careers in the New York art world.
Two years after his arrival in New York, Alexander was encouraged by several of his colleagues to study art in Europe. In 1877, he enrolled in drawing classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he quickly advanced to life-drawing classes. The following year, he and several classmates, including Joseph De Camp and John W. Beatty, joined the art colony at Polling, a small picturesque Bavarian village outside of Munich. It was established by Frank Duveneck, J. Frank Currier, and Walter Shirlaw, as well as other American artists interested in a freely brushed, spontaneous approach to painting. Known as the "Duveneck Boys," they traveled together to Venice and Florence in 1879 and 1880. In Venice, in 1880, Alexander met James McNeill Whistler, the artist who would come to exert the strongest influence on his work.
In 1881, Alexander returned to New York and began to establish himself as a portraitist. In 1887, he married Elizabeth Alexander (no relation), in 1891the couple and their young son moved to Paris. There, in 1893, he submitted three figure studies to the Salon du Champ de Mars, an annual exhibition organized to provide an alternative to the official, more conservative Salon.
By the early 1900s, Alexander was considered one of the four pre-eminent painters in America, the peer of Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. In 1905, the artist won the commission to paint the murals at the Carnegie Institute of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in 1909, he became President of the National Academy of Design. Throughout his career, music and women were frequent inspirations. The present work displays Alexander's interest in exploiting the sensuous line of the figure's pose and drapery for dramatic effect and emotive charge. According to Mary Anne Goley, the preeminent scholar on Alexander's work, the artist even designed most of the elegant dresses worn by his sitters and his wife Elizabeth made them.
At the time of this painting, John White Alexander was an internationally recognized artist. His was a multifaceted talent, a society portraitist, landscape and still life painter, illustrator, muralist, theatrical production manager, and perpetual chairman of boards of art institutions. As such, he was at the center of the art world.
Throughout his career the female form and the effects of sunlight were frequent themes. Inspired by his Parisian muse, Juliette Very, he reimagined the decorative by having the figure strike an evocative pose, for example Repos (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and elaborately arranging the skirt of the dresses as in Alethea (Barbara Millhouse). Once he returned permanently to the United States in 1900, there was a noticeable change in which he reimagined the decorative, now without Juliette for inspiration. Beginning with A Quiet Hour (1902, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), he abandoned contorting the figure in a shallow space in favor of a more conventional three-dimensional space. The striking effects of raking light, such as in A Ray of Sunlight, were softened. Continuing to evolve, figure paintings begun in the summer of 1911 show Alexander adapting theatrical lighting to picture-making and represents a new and final serialization of a favorite theme – dreamy, atmospheric sunlight. Light is the continuum and the curtained window that walls off the figure becomes the instrument of his narrative.
Painted in his Onteora, New York studio in the summer of 1913, Her Birthday is an elaborate incarnation of his late decorative style, surpassing that of The Ring (1911, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and A Meadow Flower (1912, Collection of Bernard and Joan Carl) in terms of scale and complexity of composition. Instead of co-mingling through gesture or body movement, there are three separate vignettes in which a single figure populates its own space punctuated by an arrangement of flowers: on the left, a figure seated before a round table; in the lower right, a figure kneeling on the floor gathering branches of flowers; in the upper right, a woman standing behind a table laden with an assortment of vases filled with flowers. Belle Edson, a local farmer's daughter from the area, is the model for all three figures.
This was Alexander's public picture for the season, exhibited in the Twenty-Sixth Annual Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, shortly after it was completed. One astute observer did not miss the singularity of the vignettes, noting that the upper right corner could stand alone as a complete picture. (Record Herald (Chicago), Dec. 7, 1913)
The Eighteenth Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute (International) followed in April. In a review by W.H. De B. Nelson for International Studio, he noted that the painting was a "large and somewhat detached composition. . . graceful and pleasant-looking young women in different well-studied poses are busy arranging flowers. The canvas contains many very beautiful passages and is full of delicate distinction." The latter was primarily in the handling of the warm tones of the flowers in white, blush and deep rose. The Carnegie then circulated a smaller version of the exhibit, this canvas among them, to ten museums for a year, concluding weeks before Alexander's death in 1915. -
Condition: in very good overall condition; unlined canvas; very minor scattered restoration visible under UV (additional photos available upon request)
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