The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: John W. Alexander to Walt Whitman, 17 April 1891
Date: April 17, 1891
Whitman Archive ID: loc.08284
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Notes for this letter were created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.
Contributors to digital file: Will Cooper, Amanda J. Axley, Marie Ernster, and Stephanie Blalock
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THE CHELSEA
222 WEST 23d STREET
N.Y.
Apr. 17t 91
Mr. Walt Whitman.
It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the portrait & painting1 of you a few years ago has been purchased by one of your admirers and presented to the Met. Museum of Art2 of New York—where I hope it will be seen by many thousands of people and for many years to come. I am delighted to have been the means of giving to future generations a portrait of you that is certainly one of my best works. I may tell you also that it has been engraved and is to be published in Harpers Magazine.3
Hoping you are in good health and with best of good wishes.
Very truly yours
John W. Alexander
Correspondent:
John White Alexander
(1856–1915) was an American painter and illustrator, well known for his
portraits of famous Americans including Oliver Wendell Holmes and John
Burroughs, as well as Whitman, whose portrait he worked on from 1886 to
1889.
Notes:
1. For three days beginning on Monday, February 22, 1886, Whitman sat for a portrait by Alexander. The naturalist John Burroughs termed the resulting portrait "a Bostonese Whitman—an emasculated Whitman—failing to show his power and ruggedness" (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 261). Whitman himself was not impressed (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Thursday, May 10, 1888 and Friday, June 8, 1888). [back]
2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art ("the Met") was established in 1870 in New York City. Today, the museum's permanent collections are home to more than two million works, making it the largest art museum in the Western Hempisphere. [back]
3. Harper's Monthly Magazine (sometimes Harper's New Monthly Magazine or simply Harper's) was established in 1850 by Henry J. Raymond and Fletcher Harper. The magazine published several of Whitman's poems, including "Song of the Redwood-Tree" and "Prayer of Columbus." In 1857, Fletcher Harper founded Harper's Weekly (subtitled "A Journal of Civilization"), which gained its fame for its coverage of the Civil War and its publication of cartoonist Thomas Nast's (1840–1902) work. For Whitman's relationship with these two publications, see Susan Belasco's "Harper's Monthly Magazine" and "Harper's Weekly Magazine." [back]