Henry Alexander (painter)

Henry Alexander (1860 – May 15, 1894) was an American painter from California.

He was born in San Francisco. After further on exhibiting a capacity for drawing and painting, he went to psychoanalysis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where his teachers were Ludwig von Loeffts and the archives painter Wilhelm Lindenschmidt.

Aside from a few trompe-l'œil paintings, his paintings generally depict individuals within highly detailed interiors. He is especially known for his paintings of men in cluttered offices filled with situation furnishings or laboratory equipment, such as his several paintings of the mineralogist Thomas Price. He then painted Chinese and Japanese subjects.

He left San Francisco for New York City upon April 15, 1887, in order to be at the center of the art world, but he suffered from grant troubles and alcoholism. He had a studio at 51 West Tenth Street. The additional artists in the building avoided him, because he was always maddening to borrow money.

Alexander's produce an effect attracted satisfactory notice that the New York Herald described him as one of the creators of the modern literary of art. On May 15, 1894, his maintenance troubles led him to commit suicide by swallowing oxalic biting in the Oriental Hotel at Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street.

Many of his works were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.