Therein lies a marked feature of Alexander’s work. It is art that can be lived with. It takes its place in the household and accommodates itself to almost any color scheme because of its neutral tone and lack of glittering notes. How many modern easel pictures are keyed up to the shrieking point, and are planned to outshriek their neighbors in an exhibition! They are Salon pictures--“machines” that make a clatter and having served their purpose go back to the studio and are faced against the wainscoting. But Alexander’s pictures could be taken home without danger of a family quarrel. They are delicate enough in pattern to go in the drawing-room and refined enough in manner to be seen and not heard. Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness and elaborateness of composition than the painter dreamt of in his art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic. It was not exactly his _métier_, and though he took it up with energy when asked to do so, he succeeded in producing little more than an enlargement of his easel pictures. The same tone, light, and color of his portraits and single figures went into the groupings in the Congressional Library, the Harrisburg Capitol, and the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh. The Library decorations gave the “Evolution of the Book” in six lunettes that illustrated the stages of book-making rather than symbolized or epitomized them. At Harrisburg the theme was the “Evolution of the State,” another set of fourteen lunettes. The decoration at Pittsburgh was the most ambitious performance of the three and sought to tell the story of Pittsburgh--the story of steel and labor. It is called the “Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” with the city personified by a knight in armor with a flaming sword in his hand instead of the large female figure of conventional decoration. The panels carry over three stories of the entrance-hall of the Carnegie Institute and some five hundred figures are used. The first floor shows the half-naked furnacemen at work amid smoke, steam, and fire glare. The smoke and steam rise up and envelop, make an atmospheric setting for, the allegorical figures of the second floor that from all sides are bringing tributes to the mailed figure of Pittsburgh. The allegorical figures are winged, robed in long trailing garments, and drift lightly through the air or upon clouds. The third floor contains lunettes typifying the arts and sciences.