John White Alexander (1856 -1915) was an American portrait, figure, and decorative painter and illustrator. He began his career in New York in 1875 as a political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper's Weekly. In 1877 he went to Paris for his first formal art training, and then to Munich. His first exhibition in the Paris Salon of 1893 was a brilliant success. By 1894 his reputation in both Europe and America had soared, and in 1895 he was awarded a prestigious commission for a series of murals entitled the Evolution of the Book in the newly established Library of Congress in Washington, DC.Alexander's stylistic development falls into several distinct stages. His early landscapes and genre scenes of the 1870s bear the stamp of realism. His fluid brushwork resembled that of Frans Hals and Diego Vel�zquez, painters he deeply admired. After his return to the USA in 1881, he favored a more limited palette and experimented with the suggestion of mood through shadow and gesture. Many of his later portraits, notably of women, were psychological studies rather than specific likenesses. His brushwork became less painterly and more concerned with suggesting abstracted shapes. He also adopted a very coarse-weave canvas, the texture of which became an important element in his mature work. Throughout his career Alexander favored compositions with a single figure placed against a sharply contrasting background.