(1860–1894)
Henry Alexander was one of the most brilliant genre painters active in San Francisco and New York in the late nineteenth century. Born in San Francisco, he studied at the California School of Design, and traveled to Munich in 1877, where he entered classes at the Royal Academy. Influenced by his teachers there, he adopted the tightly painted, detailed realism derived from Dutch seventeenth-century genre and figure painting.
Alexander returned to New York City late in 1883. Through his close friend, fellow artist Charles Ulrich, he immediately gained the patronage of Thomas B. Clarke, the country’s foremost collector of contemporary art. Alexander showed his paintings the following year at both the National Academy of Design and the Society of American Artists, and by March of 1884, had returned to San Francisco, where he became one of the city’s foremost painters of figures in interiors, including domestic scenes and exotic Chinatown rooms. He continued to be extensively lauded in the California press after he returned to New York in 1887, and his work was included in the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Surely due to his amazingly precise technique, Alexander’s output was limited and his paintings today are quite rare, all the more so because a great number of his pictures were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
