Alexander has been called “the most Parisian of the Americans,” and yet just why one hardly knows. His refined taste, his sensitiveness, his animation are less French than American, and it must be his method that suggests Paris. But whom in Paris? What painter can you point to as the original or even the inspiration of his style? Carrière, Besnard, La Touche--you think of them only to dismiss them from mind. Whistler, Albert Moore, Burne-Jones, the Japanese, afford little clew. Perhaps the obvious explanation is that Alexander merely followed his own inclination and developed a method and a style quite his own. Others have done so before him and why not he? Very likely some one suggested a coarse absorbent canvas with thin petroleum or turpentine as a medium, or he may have seen the results obtained by such materials in pictures at the Salon or elsewhere. Paris has always been replete with new mediums and methods and has had its generations of painters who could do no more with the new than with the old. But Alexander’s painting was something more than an absorbent canvas. He had an original point of view and the new materials merely helped him to reveal it. Perhaps his originality grew out of many observations and developed from many sources. Duveneck in the realistic and Whistler with the decorative each had their day and sway with him. Something of the Japanese becomes apparent in a flattening of the canvas, in elimination of non-essential features, in gaining a sketchy effect by filling in large spaces with flat tones and throwing emphasis upon salient points of high light and color. Finally comes an unusual employment of dress in making a pattern of swirling lines which not only contrast with the angles of the canvas but lend movement and life to the figure. The use of drapery for line effect is, of course, apparent all through art. Alexander may have taken suggestions regarding this from Greek marbles or Italian pictures or Pre-Raphaelite glass. But so vague and shadowy are all these sources of influence that one cannot trace them home. Such pictures as “The Green Gown,” “A Rose,” “The Gossip,” “The Ring,” have no counterpart in any painting, ancient or modern. One comes back again to a former conclusion that they are Alexander’s own creations--his distinct contribution to art.