Henry Alexander
Henry Alexander
1860 - 1895
American painter. San Francisco’s first native-born artist, he was among the most intriguing of late 19th-century American painters. Little is known about his short life and career, for which there are only four or five reliable dates. He was the second child of an eastern European Jewish immigrant family that settled in San Francisco sometime before 1860. He received his early art training at the California School of Design, where he studied with Toby Rosenthal (1848–1917), probably in 1872–3. A year or two later he left for Europe for prolonged study in Munich. The first definite date of his career is his arrival in New York in 1883 and subsequent return to San Francisco, where he maintained studios in the financial district for about four years. On 15 April 1887, he sailed by way of Panama for New York City, where, seven years later—ill, poverty-stricken and deeply despondent—he took his life by drinking a carbolic acid ‘cocktail’. Most of what is known about Alexander, other than the evidence of some 30 surviving paintings, appears in the newspaper obituaries reporting his suicide at the age of about 35.
Once described in the New York Herald as one of the creators of the ‘modern school of art’, Alexander was, in fact, a traditional genre painter in the dark Munich manner, a style made unfashionable by the rise of the brighter, more cosmopolitan Impressionist movement. Along with his friend and fellow student Charles Frederick Ulrich (1858–1908), Alexander was a representative of the later academic Munich style that emulated the precise rendering and subdued tones of the 17th-century Dutch ‘little masters’. Among his other friends in Germany was fellow San Franciscan Henry Raschen (1854–1937), who later became a noted specialist in the depiction of native American Indians.
Most of Alexander’s surviving works are San Francisco subjects depicting identifiable interiors and specific activities of the 1880s (see fig.). Typical of a series of scientific and trade genre pictures is The First Lesson (San Francisco, CA, F.A. Museums), in which taxidermist William Nolte is seen demonstrating his craft to apprentice William J. Hackimer in the former’s Golden Gate Avenue studio (identification according to Williams). The Lost Genius (Berkeley, CA, Univ. A. Mus.), showing an aged cobbler in his meticulously detailed storefront shop playing his violin with a black boy listening at the door, brings to mind the work of William Sidney Mount, J. D. Chalfant (1856–1931) or even Eastman Johnson. Alexander is also known for his views of Chinese interiors, including ‘opium dens’. Despite their descriptive realism, these paintings convey an evocative mood both contemplative and mysterious.
Alexander’s slightly off-centre, enigmatic work never found a comfortable art-historical niche, in spite of his Munich training and clear ambitions to succeed as a genre and portrait painter, first in San Francisco and then in New York. The problem of his posthumous reputation is compounded by several factors, including his short career and the destruction of the majority of his output by fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The unsold paintings were stored by the family in a warehouse on Sansome Street in anticipation of a major retrospective. It was not until three decades later, however, that the first retrospective of Alexander’s work took place, at Gump’s Art Gallery, San Francisco (1937). Only two further exhibitions of his paintings have been held, both also in San Francisco: one at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1940) and another at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (1973), which displayed the 20 paintings at the time believed to be the total of his extant oeuvre. [Paul J. Karlstrom. "Alexander, Henry." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096242.]
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