John White Alexander

John White Alexander (1856-1915) was an American portrait, figure, and decorative painter and illustrator.

Alexander was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now a part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 7th October 1856. Orphaned in infancy, he was reared by his grandparents. He became a telegraph boy in Pittsburgh at the age of 12. Edward J. Allen (1830-1915), the secretary/treasurer of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, recognised Alexander's drawing talent while he worked there and adopted him. Allen brought Alexander to the Allen home at "Edgehill" where Alexander painted various members of the Allen family, including Colonel Allen.

Alexander moved to New York City at the age of 18 and worked in an office at Harper's Weekly, where he was an illustrator and political cartoonist at the same time that Edwin Austin Abbey, Joseph Pennell, Howard Pyle, and other celebrated illustrators worked there. After an apprenticeship of three years, he travelled to Munich for his first formal training. Owing to the lack of funds, he removed to the village of Polling, Bavaria, and worked with Frank Duveneck. They travelled to Venice, where he profited from the advice of Whistler, and then he continued his studies in Florence, the Netherlands, and Paris.

In 1881, he returned to New York City and quickly achieved great success in portraiture, numbering among his sitters Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Henry G. Marquand, R.A.L. Stevenson, and James McCosh, the president of Princeton University.

His first exhibition in the Paris Salon of 1893 was a brilliant success and was followed by his immediate election to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. In 1889 he painted for Mrs. Jeremiah Milbank a well-received portrait of Walt Whitman and one of her husband, Jeremiah Milbank. In 1901 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1902 he became a member of the National Academy of Design, where he served as president from 1909 to 1915. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the gold medals of the Paris Exposition (1900) and the World's Fair in St. Louis (1904).

In 1909 the National Arts Club presented a retrospective exhibition of his work that included 63 canvases as well as photographs of his work.

He was several times a judge at the annual exhibit of the Carnegie Institution, and in other years he won prizes, once an honourable mention and twice the first prize, the second time in 1911 for Sunlight.

Alexander was married to Elizabeth Alexander (1866-1947), to whom he was introduced in part because of their shared last name. She was the daughter of James Waddell Alexander (1839-1915), longtime executive of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. The Alexanders had one child, the Princeton mathematician James Waddell Alexander II.

Alexander died of heart disease at his home in New York City on 31st May 1915. He was buried in Princeton, New Jersey, following a church service in Manhattan.

He served as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1909 until his death.