John Alexander

John Alexander, Great Horny Owl, 2008, drawing, charcoal and watercolor on paper

2008

John Alexander was one of the leading Scottish artists of the 18th century. Born to an Aberdeen doctor, he boasted patrilineal descent from George Jamesone, a purported student of Rubens and Van Dyck, and the founder of a Scottish school of portraiture which found its highest expression in Ramsay and Raeburn in the following century. Alexander travelled to Rome in 1711 where he trained under Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari. He produced engravings after Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican Loggia, and worked for the Marquess of Annandale to collect paintings and sculpture; he made drawings of the works, and collected some copies for himself, which he brought back to Scotland in 1720. Whilst in Italy, Alexander received commissions from the Medici in Florence, and the exiled Stuart court in Rome, who included the Lord Chief Justice Coke and the Earl of Mar. Lord Mar had arrived in Italy after the failed Jacobite rising of 1715, and even commissioned Alexander on behalf of the exiled Royal family: Alexander wrote to Mar, ‘You will receive from the post the Parnassus of Raphael […] I pray you anew to excuse my weak beginnings to the King’ (Holloway, p. 86). Alexander married Isobel Innes of Tillyfour in 1723 and their son Cosmo was born the following year. Their younger son Charles was sent abroad to the Scots Benedictine College at Ratisbon, and his daughter married George Chalmers, son to Roderick Chalmers and heir to an impoverished baronetcy. Alexander took a number of aristocratic commissions, which included the 4th Earl and Countess of Kinmore; James Hamilton, 5th Duke of Hamilton; and the 7th Earl of Wemyss. He was based in Edinburgh in his later career, painting figures of early Enlightenment Edinburgh, such as George Drummond, the Lord Provost who had envisaged the grid plan of Edinburgh’s New Town. Alexander was a close friend of the architect James Gibbs, and the engraver and antiquary George Vertue, who described the artist as ‘a merry dispos’d gent, [who] laughs eternally’ (Holloway, p. 85). Alexander was a signatory in 1729 of the charter of Scotland’s first art institution, the Academy of St Luke of Edinburgh.