Two winters were spent at Florence--the summer months being more agreeably put in at Venice. It was at Venice in the summer of 1880 that Alexander met Whistler and received counsel and direction from him. The advice was very potent in helping him out of the dark Munich rut and suggesting that the decorative was perhaps more important than the merely realistic or representative. Indeed the Whistler influence was the most compelling the young student had yet encountered. It made a decided impression upon him and changed perhaps the whole trend of his art. For while Alexander never imitated Whistler’s schemes or patterns, he accepted the decorative point of view, giving it out in his own way with many changes and modifications brought about by later observation in Paris. He was always impressionable and quick to adopt new ideas, and yet it is almost impossible in his work to trace home any feature to a given source. In that respect he was perhaps more original than Chase or even Whistler himself. While in Florence he supported himself by sending drawings to the Harper publications and teaching a class of students; but he soon realized that he was holding back his own progress by such work, and in 1881 he decided to return to America. Arrived at Pittsburgh, he made a trip down the Ohio and the Mississippi with Fred Muller to illustrate an article on “King Coal’s Highway.” The article appeared in _Harper’s Monthly_ for January, 1882. The illustrations were realistic enough, but not remarkable in any way. They created no furor. Alexander came on shortly thereafter to New York, took a studio in the German Bank Building, at Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and soon was doing a portrait of a little daughter of Henry Harper. He moved to the Chelsea Studios in Twenty-third Street, continued with portraiture, and became interested in the art movements of the time. People looked upon him as a young man of ability. He had not Chase’s vogue but he, nevertheless, had his group of admirers. In 1881 he was in Spain and Morocco, and in 1886 he went to England for the _Century Magazine_, having been commissioned to do certain portraits of literary men--George Bancroft, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson. He did Stevenson at Bournemouth, stopping with him while sketching him. He also did Austin Dobson, and went to Ireland to draw some illustrations for articles by Charles de Kay. The portraits were apparently sketches in charcoal and gave only a summary of the heads. They were well done and rightly emphasized for reproduction. The illustrations for the Ireland articles were decidedly good in the landscapes--something for which Alexander had a talent, but which he never cared to follow up until late in life and then apparently for his own pleasure. This work and, in fact, that of the next half-dozen years did not bring Alexander into any great prominence in America. He had not found himself--he had not “arrived” in a large sense.