The portrait of Dorothy Roosevelt was executed in 1901-1902, when John White Alexander returned to the United States from his most recent ten-year European stay.The sitter was the first cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt and was soon to marry Langdon Geer. The portrait effortlessly demonstrates all the qualities that put Alexander in demand. The simplicity of the composition-a solitary seated figure accompanied by a dog-allows for a focus on Miss Roosevelt, whose grace is emphasized by the sweeping brushwork that defines her tall, elegant figure. Yet the oblique gaze and profile view remove this painting from the straightforward depiction of a particular sitter and position it as a study in reverie.

　John White Alexander was a truly cosmopolitan painter whose mature career is a synthesis of the major stylistic trends affecting late 19th-century American art. He studied in both Paris and Munich and subsequently became friends with the expatriate American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose influence may be seen in the mysterious slightly melancholy nature of this portrait. Alexander was also widely acclaimed as a muralist and illustrator.

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　John White Alexander was a truly cosmopolitan painter, whose mature career is a synthesis of the major stylistic trends affecting late 19th-century American art. In 1874, eighteen-year-old John White Alexander moved to New York City and found an illustrator job at Harper's Weekly. Like so many young Americans after the Civil War, Alexander traveled to Paris in pursuit of formal art training, but he quickly moved to Germany. He joined the smaller number of students residing in Munich, where painting from life, directly onto the canvas was emphasized instead of the preparatory drawing of the French school. Alexander became one of “Duveneck’s boys,” the group of devoted pupils of Cincinnati-born Frank Duveneck, who with William Merritt Chase was one of the earliest adherents of the Munich school—and whose return to the U.S. in the late 1870s revolutionized art making and instruction for a generation. After his encounter and subsequent friendship with James Abbott McNeill Whistler during a trip to Venice, Alexander's style shifted to include elements of Aestheticism in addition to Munich-trained realism. The heavy brushwork of the Munich artists emphasized the outer world by laying down paint to build forms, but Whistler encouraged Alexander to soften his technique, attenuating figures to suggest mood, not matter.

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