Francis Alexander

Background

Francis Alexander was born on February 3, 1800 at Killingly, Connecticut, United States.

Education

Alexander managed to get to New York about the year 1820 and studied under Alexander Robertson at the Academy of Fine Arts, also copying portraits by Trumbull and Samuel Waldo.

Career

Alexander set up as a portrait painter in Providence, removing after two years to Boston, where he remained until October 1831. Then he started upon a trip to Italy. He returned to the United States in 1832. In 1835 he painted a portrait of Daniel Webster now at Dartmouth College. Other portraits he painted were of Benjamin R. Curtis and Mrs. Daniel Webster. He also drew on stone what were probably the first attempts at portrait lithography in America. His early work was rather good in color and careful in drawing, but during his trip to Italy he changed his manner. Although his later work became less colorful and was executed with a rapidity that was almost careless, it was so much what his sitters in Boston wanted that he became popular. He finally took up his residence in Florence.

During the last years of his life he was not active in his profession. He contemplated returning to the United States in 1878. It is not certain that he ever returned, and he is supposed to have died in Florence.

Achievements

• Francis Alexander has been listed as a notable portrait painter, lithographer by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Odsan Gallery Self Portrait - By Francis Alexander - Canvas Prints 24" by 32" Unframed

    (This is an Unframed 24" by 32" Canvas Prints of Self Port...)

Views

Quotations: "From the age of eight up to twenty I laboured almost incessantly, the eight warm months of the year, upon my father's farm. The other four months in the year I went to a country district school till I was seventeen. I had been to Providence, " he continues, "had seen signs there, and those were the only marvels in painting that I saw till I was twenty except two very ordinary portraits that I had seen at some country inn. "

Membership

In 1840 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an honorary member.

Personality

Alexander was a shrewd, business-like man and carried his faculty for driving a bargain to such an extent that his associates called him the "Art Jockey. " French tells the story of his going out in a boat in Boston harbor, in 1845, to meet the steamer upon which Charles Dickens arrived from England, and asking for a sitting as soon as he met the novelist. Dickens granted the request and later remarked: "The impertinence of the thing was without limit; but the enterprise was most astonishing, and deserved any kind of reward demanded. "

Connections

Alexander was married to Lucia Gray Swett, the daughter of Colonel Samuel Swett of Boston, a "lady of exceptional beauty and wealth. " Their daughter Francesca Alexander became a popular illustrator, author, and translator.

Spouse:

Lucia Gray (Swett) Alexander

Daughter:

Francesca Alexander

References

• Art and artists in Connecticut
• Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers