Arts and Letters

In John White Alexander a frail body lodged a tireless eager spirit—tireless and unquenched by illness to the very end, eager not only in search for beauty, but in service to his fellows. Among artists, some are recorders, some arrangers, some are creators, and some are dreamers of dreams.

Now and then comes a man who may belong to any one of these groups, but who adds to his artistic gift and his technical acquirement a capacity for communication of enthusiasm to others and an instinctive desire to stimulate, to push at the wheels wherever he sees that they turn slowly. Such a man soon becomes a leader. Toward leadership John Alexander gravitated instinctively, and in it he established himself solidly, using the experience of one official position to affirm that of another, touching the circle of the arts at many points in its circumference, and strengthening himself by every fresh touch. If a man is strong enough physically to withstand the demands of such arduous effort, he gains enormously in the power to synthetize that effort and to build up from one department to another.

Alexander was not strong enough, and he paid the physical penalty; but while his life lasted he never relaxed that effort, and he made it fruitful, feeding it always with persistent enthusiasm.

For an instance in this synthetizing of effort, he worked first as a member of the Metropolitan Museum's board at increasing and safeguarding that museum's treasures; next as a member of the School Art League he worked at the provision of intelligent appreciation of those treasures—appreciation planted in the minds of the children of the city to grow till it should reward the museum's effort with understanding adult and trained.

He talked to the children who flocked to see the painting and sculpture and the art objects of all kinds. And when the children went away, he followed them to their East Side clubs and schools and talked to them again, encouraging them to try experiments of their own in painting and modeling, and he stimulated them with prizes that adjudged and sometimes instituted. He loved his work among the children, and he told me, with a twinkle, and more than once, of how these very young people managed to fortify the doubtful experiment of a journey into art by the undoubted pleasure of at least beginning that journey on roller-skates. "Dozens of them," said he, "skate to their lecture." If he was busy with the children's welfare, the interests of his comrades of all ages busied him still more. He was a painter through and through; nevertheless, the sister arts of music and the drama claimed and obtained his time in one of his favorite fields of effort, the MacDowell Club.

To the plastic presentation of the drama, its costuming, lighting, and colors, he gave enthusiastic attention, aided almost always by Mrs. Alexander. It was an easy progression for him from his canvases to the moving-pictures of a pageant or a play, and his swift inventiveness enabled him to get through a prodigious amount of work in a short time, in such productions, for instance, as Miss Maude Adams's Jeanne d'Arc at the Harvard Stadium; or in the many series of tableaux which he arranged for charity. "If you have a frame and some gauze," said he to me, "you have no idea how much you can do in a moment with a few colored rags." I had an idea, for I had seen him juggle with them and had admired the effects which he produced so easily, for he seemed to take pains easily, and with a geniality which relieved his beneficiary from a sense of too great obligation. This graceful suavity was a potent factor in his helpfulness; but he was so smiling and kindly that I fear one did not always realize how much his ready service sometimes tired him.

During the last year of his life I saw him many times a week, and we often came home together from the Academy council or from other committee meetings.

Although, as I have said, his spirit was not tired, his body was. Again and again he rose from a sick-bed to preside upon a platform. His delicate features, which recalled some cavalier's portrait by Van Dyke, were at times during his last year almost transparent-looking. And yet he was so resilient, he so responded to the stimulus of work to do, he had recovered so many times from severe attacks, that his death, when it came, was not only a great shock, but was a surprise.

Critics, writers of books, will talk to us at length of his art; there is time to-day for only the briefest impression of it. One would say that a refinement rising to distinction was its most obvious quality. Pattern and lighting were what seemed to interest him most of all. Long, sweeping, curving lines he sought for or rather seemed to find without searching, and they gave a decorative character to all his portraits.

In his color restraint was a notable quality, a notable preservative, a notable insurance against either crudity or lushness, against vulgarity of any kind. Now and again he composed large and elaborated groups, as in his panels for the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, which make up one of the most considerable extensive series of decorations ever painted. But he loved simplicity, and thought simply in his painting, and he seemed to like best and be happiest in his treatment of single figures. It was peculiarly in these that his sense of pattern and of line, of long, sweeping curves, never failed him.

He was very personal in lighting, which was simple and large, yet at the same time was often extremely picturesque in its arrangement. Its effect was not a little enhanced by his predisposition toward masses of reflected light, which he used with great skill.

Restraint reaching to sobriety marked most of his color. He liked to use a warm gray in wide planes, and then to strike into it one or two dominant spots of rich or brilliant colors. Just before his death he built a very large studio in the Catskills, and I believe that the trees and hills of his beloved Onteora got into the color of his pictures and helped toward that predilection for a whole gamut of greens which one may easily note on the walls of his exhibitions—gray greens, blue greens, olive greens, yellow greens, greens of the color of thick glass. His pigment was brushed easily and flowingly. Sometimes he painted a whole portrait with what artists would call a "fat brush," but usually the color was thin, with occasional loaded passages, the canvas being sometimes hardly more than stained.

The sureness of his recording was remarkable, and its swiftness was phenomenal. This of course was an extraordinary insurance against any kind of heaviness in his color, since overpainting is one of the worst enemies to freshness of surface. His swiftness of recording must be emphasized again. I should hardly dare to say in how short a time he executed one or two portraits that hung upon the walls of his drawing-room, and which he called unfinished, though they were very satisfying, certainly, to me.

Much as I should like to linger over his painting, I cannot keep away from the subject of his eagerness to help other artists to find a gallery adequate to the housing of their painting. The search for a home for the National Academy of Design was the central preoccupation of the last years of his life. It was interesting, indeed, when he spoke upon any platform and any subject, to see how many angles of approach he could find to that one subject which was nearest his heart, the new gallery, which should some day house a dozen different societies of artists.

I have said that some artists are recorders, some creators, and some are dreamers of dreams. Recorder and creator he certainly was. While he was still a child he was for a while a little messenger-boy, and he never ceased to be a messenger, bringing stimulus of words and example, writing his name with Ben Adhem's as a lover of his fellow-men. And a dreamer he was of dreams—of a dream which we fully believe will come true, when New York will have a great gallery all its own, and which we may link in our thought with the memory of that brilliant artist and devoted president of the National Academy of Design, John White Alexander.