JOHN WHITE ALEXANDER (1856-1915)

In 1915, The New York Globe reflected of John White Alexander: “Few men of his generation had a better sense of the beautiful. His spirit turned toward the bright and joyous things of life rather than toward its tragedies” (as quoted in M.A. Goley, John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age, London, 2018, p. viii). A Ray of Sunlight exemplifies this sensuous beauty which earned Alexander’s paintings recognition both in the United States and Europe. Exhibited broadly, including the 1899 Paris Salon, before its original acquisition by the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, the present work represents the height of Alexander’s acclaimed career.
Alexander was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before making his way to New York for an early career in illustration and then off to Paris and Germany to further his studies in art. Under the mentorship of fellow American expatriate Frank Duveneck, he explored the bold, painterly Munich style of portraiture and traveled to Italy, meeting James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In his mature career, he led a cosmopolitan lifestyle between Paris and New York City as a prominent member of the fashionable social, literary and artistic circles. During the 1890s he became close friends with Henry James and entertained such notables as Claude Debussy, John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Oscar Wilde.
A Ray of Sunlight, as well as The Toiler (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), are among four works Alexander painted of his muse and model Juliette Very during the summer of 1898 in Val-de-la-Haye, a French village outside of Rouen. Describing the present work, Mary Anne Goley writes, “It was considered fresh, charming, mysterious, an effective play of light, a fine tonal study and more…The pose is one that only Juliette Very could carry off as she leans into the instrument, her right arm attenuated, her body an analogue to the shape of the cello. Her head is thrown back exposing the flesh of the throat with sensual abandon...What is new and fresh about this picture is the slightly ‘mannered,’ distended body” (John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age, pp. 102-03).
A Ray of Sunlight earned the Walter Lippincott prize when first exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1899. The popular admiration of the work is summarized by a contemporary review, praising, “'The Ray of Sunlight' is the best technically that it has been the privilege of the writer of these columns to see…Her face and figure are in shadow, and from some obscure niche above her there streams in a streak of mellow sunlight, touching only her shoulder and bare arm. It is no mean workman who can set himself a task like that and accomplish it without faltering” ("The Academy's Annual Show," Philadelphia Inquirer, January 15, 1899, section 2, p. 6).