Alexander had been schooled in the art of portraiture while working for Harper's Magazine and Century Magazine for which he submitted portraits of prominent Europeans. Mary Anne Goley’s book, John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age, is a well-researched, appreciative biography of a lesser-known, but once celebrated, decorative. Stevenson and State Supreme Court Justice Mercer Beasley. He painted the likenesses of such luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Burroughs, Walt Whitman, Henry G. In 1881 after a time spent in Europe traveling with fellow painters Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase, John White Alexander returned to New York and achieved great success in the art of portraiture. from 1905, unfinished) and continued to paint portraits. After 1901 Alexander became deeply involved with the promotion of the arts in America. By 1893 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. He also exhibited at the National Academy of Design.

In 1881 he returned to New York, working as an illustrator for Harper's, as a drawing instructor at Princeton and as a highly successful society portrait painter. In 1879 they traveled to Italy, where Alexander formed friendships with James McNeill Whistler and Henry James. Pittsburgh-born John White Alexander (1856-1915) was an internationally recognized portrait painter.

In 1878 he joined a colony of American painters established by Frank Duveneck in Polling, Bavaria. In 1877 he went to Paris for his first formal art training, and then to Munich, where he enrolled at the Kunstakademie under Gyuala Benczúr. He began his career in New York in 1875 as a political cartoonist and illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He was known as an American painter and illustrator. John White Alexander was born in Allegheny, PA on he died in New York on.

John White Alexander by Mary Anne Goley