Alexander Doyle was born on January 28, 1857 in Steubenville, Ohio, United States. He was the son of George and Alice (Butler) Doyle. From earliest childhood he was familiar with the practical aspects of monument-making due to his father being engaged in an important quarrying business. His great-grandfather, Basil Doyle, was a civil engineer who in Revolutionary days removed from Maryland to Ohio, and became one of the first settlers of Steubenville.
In 1869, the boy Alexander was taken by his parents to live in Italy, where he studied music, painting, and sculpture.
Returning to the United States after about three years, he graduated from the Louisville High School, and in 1874 went back to Italy.
His studies in sculpture were pursued in the National Academies at Carrara, Rome, and Florence. His masters were Nicoli, Dupre, Pellicia. Whatever artistic training he received abroad was reinforced by his knowledge of the business side of a sculptor’s work, especially as regards marble, granite, and limestone.
Doyle sometimes acted as organist in Italian churches.
Settling in New York City in 1878, and taking as partner a talented English sculptor named Moffitt, Doyle soon became widely known as a maker of monuments. His agreeable personality, his father’s business connections, and the fact that his partner was a Roman Catholic were helpful in securing commissions.
Though an honorary member of the Royal Raphael Academy at Urbino, Italy, he joined no American art societies and sent nothing to American art exhibitions. His works, however, are numerous, and are found in widely separated sections of the country—East, South, and Middle West state committees rightly having confidence in his ability to complete his contracts.
The assertion that “at thirty-three he had done more public monuments than any other sculptor, and was producer of more than a fifth of those standing in the country” would seem to stress quantity rather than quality.
In Statuary Hall of the National Capitol he is represented by statues of Thomas II. Benton and Francis P. Blair, given by Missouri, and by the statue of John E. Kenna of West Virginia. His marble portrait with pedestal at the grave of John Howard Payne and his marble portrait statue of the Rt. Reverend William Pinckney are in Washington, D. C. ; his Francis Scott Key monument is in Frederick.
On the death of his father, Doyle devoted himself to the management of the Bedford limestone quarries which he had inherited. In 1906, when it was decided to erect in Steubenville a statue of Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war under Lincoln, he undertook the work gratuitously, Steubenville being Stanton’s native town as well as his own. He was engaged on this until his retirement in 1911.
From that time until his death, eleven years later, he lived in Dedham, not wholly unoccupied, as he there completed a heroic statue of Lincoln, “to he erected somewhere in Europe after the close of the World War”.
Among his prominent works are the heroic seated bronze statue of Horace Greeley, given to the city of New York in 1890, the Soldiers’ Monument in New Haven, a bronze equestrian statue of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, a bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee, and a marble statue of Margaret Haughery, “The Bread Giver, ” the last three being in New Orleans; the National Revolutionary Monument at Yorktowm; eight colossal marble figures in the State Capitol, Indianapolis; a bronze statue of General Stcedman in Toledo, Ohio, and a marble statue of Gen. Garfield in Cleveland. For Atlanta he made the marble statue of Senator Benjamin H. Hill, and the bronze statue and monument to Henry W. Grady.
Doyle had an agreeable personality.
In 1880, at Hallowell Doyle married Fannie, daughter of Mark and Sarah Johnson.
