When I first wrote about American painter and illustrator John White Alexander in 2006, not many image resources were available.
Since then, the internet has done that which it does best, grown at an incredible rate, and several additional sources of images for this wonderful painter have appeared, and I’ve collected some of them below; though I’m still frustrated in my inability to find much representative of his illustration work.
As a painter, Alexander was primarily a portraitist, most notably of women, and his portraits ranged from relatively staid to sweepingly dramatic, handled with bravura brushwork and rich colors. Though not as dazzling with a brush as John Singer Sargent or Cecilia Beaux (how many were?), Alexander’s portraits delight with luxuriously rendered fabrics and theatrically lit compositions.
There is a book available, John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880-1915 by Sarah J. Moore, but I haven’t personally seen it.
The Library of Congress, for which he did murals titled “The Evolution of the Book” (see images on Wikimedia Commons), has a collection of his papers, the web version of which includes some of his sketchbooks.
