The whole decoration is well thought out, and is put together, within its framings of yellowish marble, with a distinctly decorative effect. The tone of it is quiet, subdued, restful--perhaps too much so. The figures are graceful, even the men--again, perhaps too much so. One is not sorry that Labor is shown with cheerful face and normal body rather than sad-browed, nerve-racked, and body-wrecked, after the Zola-Meunier formula. That exaggeration has become just as conventional and wearisome as the prettiness of Bouguereau, or the pettiness of Meissonier. But Alexander’s workers are perhaps too elegant for reality as his floating figures are too graceful for allegory. There is a feeling that there is not enough mental grip about them. It is paradoxical to say that the decoration is too decorative, but that states the case quite rightly. The pattern and the color that set off an easel picture appropriately fail to carry when employed on so vast a scale of wall decoration--fail to carry from sheer attenuation of motive and design. The Pittsburgh decoration has not enough strength behind it to spread over five thousand feet of painted surface. Strength was never a quality of Alexander’s art. He had skill, grace, refinement, charm, style, but he never attempted to win by force or power. After his return from Paris in 1901 he took up his permanent residence in New York and immediately entered into the art life of the city and the country. He had received gold medals at Paris and St. Louis and the Legion of Honor from France, had placed his pictures in public galleries all the way from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Chicago, and had become a member of some twenty art societies. In addition to the McDowell Club and the School Art League he was the head of the Federation of Fine Arts, the Society of Mural Painters, and from 1909 the president of the National Academy of Design. His interest in art movements was great and the energy he gave to them was at the expense not only of his painting but his health. As president of the Academy of Design his devotion was unflagging even though it met with almost everything but encouragement and success. During his presidency he took up anew the problem of a building site which had been dragging along for years. There had been failure in Fifty-seventh Street in 1896, and over the Lenox Library plot in 1904, but Alexander failed four further times with the sites of the Arsenal, the Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Railroad Yard.