Francis Alexander

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Francis Alexander (1800-1881), is an American portrait-painter, was born in Killingly, Connecticut, on February 3, 1800. Brought up on a farm, he taught himself the use of colors, and in 1820 went to New York City and studied painting with Alexander Robertson. He spent the winters of 1831 and 1832 in Rome, and then for nearly a decade he lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had considerable vogue, and where in 1842 he painted a portrait of Charles Dickens. One of his best portraits is that of Mrs Fletcher Webster in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He died in 1881 in Florence.

[edit] External links

• Additional Biographical Info.
• Museum of Fine Art, Boston

Francis Alexander's romantic portrait of Mrs. Fletcher Webster, in which she appears swathed in ermine, was deaccessioned from the Museum of Fine Art early in the 20th century and returned to descendants in the Sargent family. A Dartmouth College publication on her father-in-law, Daniel Webster, reproduces the portrait's image in black and white.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.