Paintings Cosmo Alexander

Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772) was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, the son of Catholic portrait painter & engraver John Alexander (1690-1765) and the great grandson of George Jameson (c.1587-1644), whom Horace Walpole called "the Vandyke of Scotland."

Alexander was so staunchly committed to the Jacobite cause, that he had to flee Scotland for participating in the 1745 Rising. After the disasterous Jacobite defeat at Culloden, he sought refuge in nurturing, sympathetic, artistic Rome between 1747-1751. He carried with him a letter of introduction to the Jacobite court declaring that he was "a lad of genius in painting."

From that point on, Alexander studied art & painted portraits of exiled Catholic leaders including "Bonnie" Prince Charles Edward Stuart. He continued studing in Livorno & Paris in 1751-52, before returning to London to live in a house he would soon inherit from architect James Gibbs (1674-1754), who was also a Catholic born in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Cosmo Alexander left London for the Netherlands a decade later and then sailed for America in 1766, after the death of his father. In the Atlantic colonies he focused on connecting with the Scottish community, moving from town to town in search of commissions. Records show that he joined the St. Andrew's Society, a charitable group organized to assist fellow Scots, in both New York & Philadelphia, where he paused t0 paint.

He also painted in Boston & New Jersey. Colonial governor William Franklin (loyalist son of Benjamin Franklin) wrote in his correspondence that Alexander lived for several weeks in the governor's mansion in Burlington, New Jersey, painting and receiving patrons there.

Colonial Governor Franklin mentioned Alexander's frail condition in one of his letters to England, "He was last year deprived of the use of his limbs by a fit of sickness, but is since recovered & got to work again."
Alexander met his greatest portrait success in Newport, Rhode Island, where one young man remembered he was "of delicate health and prepossessing manners" and that he "associated almost exclusively with the gentlemen from Scotland."

In Newport, Alexander met 14-year-old Gilbert Stuart (1754-1828), who was the son of a Scottish immigrant snuff millwright also thought to be a Jacobite. Bright young Stuart had already painted the famous portrait Dr. Hunter's Spaniels, which hangs today in the Hunter House Mansion in Newport, when he was 12-years-old. (See the January 28, 2009, post on this blog.)
Fellow Jacobite exile Dr. William Hunter, who owned the spaniels in Newport, convinced Alexander to take young Stuart as his apprentice. The pair traveled south in 1771, visiting Williamsburg & Charleston, before departing together for Edinburgh, where Alexander died suddenly the next year on August 25, 1772. Attempting briefly and without success to earn a living as a painter, Gilbert Stuart returned to Newport in 1773.

I am stepping over the line to include a portrait from Scotland in the following examples of Cosmo Alexander's work. It has only the slightest connection to America, but I am going to grab it. In the spring of 2003, the Drambuie Liqueur Company sent its Jacobite art collection on tour to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Among the paintings attributed to Alexander was Portrait of a Jacobite Lady, showing a woman in a tartan riding habit holding the Jacobite symbol, the white rose. This flimsy connection, plus the fact that the sitter is a woman, is the rationale I am using to post this non-American 1745-59 portrait here.

During the 1745 Rebellion when Bonnie Prince Charlie tried to wrest back the British throne from the Hanoverian dynasty, he arrived in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh to great fanfare. Many women donned tartan dresses & Jacobite symbols. The Prince thanked one of the most enthusiastic Edinburgh families supporting the Jacobite cause, the MacKinnons, by giving them the secret recipe for the after-dinner whisky liqueur called Drambuie. The MacKinnon family ran a company producing the spirit for over 250 years.

This painting, Portrait of a Jacobite Lady, vividly demonstrates how art can be used to express a political belief. After the 1745 uprising, the British government made it illegal to be a Jacobite. Subjects in the Scottish Highland region (the area where most of the prince's supporters lived) were forbidden to carry weapons or wear tartans (the plaid fabric representing their family). Obviously, supporting someone to overthrow the ruler was against the law; and if a subject were discovered to be a Jacobite, the sentence would be death. Jacobites had to express their support of the Stuart family in secret or leave Scotland.

Aside...Even though the area around Culloden House was a disaster for the Jacobite cause, I love the place. At the time of the Jacobite rising in 1745-46, Culloden House was requisitioned by Bonnie Prince Charlie for use as his lodging & battle headquarters prior to the fateful battle on Culloden Moor on April 16, 1746. The final boggy battle on the open marshy moor just to the southeast of Culloden House proved to be an hour-long massacre of many of the 4,500 poorly fed, exhausted, & demoralized Jacobite army by the rested, ready, & vicious govenment force of 9,000. It has been estimated that there are some 20 million people of Scots descent living in other countries as a result of the huge diaspora which was the aftermath of this single battle.
Approaching the house with its 40 acre parkland is a special treat. As you near the house, you pass an early octagonal dovecot with 640 nesting boxes that would have provided fresh meat for the table in days gone by. Today you walk through the entrance hall at Culloden House into a tranquil large drawing room with a crackling open fireplace. Fires also greet you in the guest rooms which are huge with great views of the majestic front lawn or the peaceful lake at the rear. The dining room is capped with 19th century Adams plasterwork, & the meals are first rate. And I swear we hear pipers playing just as we retire each evening. But back to the blog...
I am including the paintings (attributed to Alexander) of the young girls with the sheep & the squirrel not because they are very young American females, but just because they fascinate me. (See postings on this blog January 28 & 29, 2009.)


1745-50s Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772.) Portrait of a Jacobite Lady. The Drambuie Collection, Edinburgh. (Reproduction at myartprints.com.)
1770 Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772). Margaret Stiles Manning. Brown University Portrait Collection. (This depiction is from a lecture slide. Do not copy or reproduce. Contact the university for an accurate image.)

1770 Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772). Mary Jemima Balfour. Virginia Historical Society. (This depiction is from a lecture slide. Do not copy or reproduce. Contact the historical society for an accurate image.)
1770 Attributed to Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772). Girl with a Lamb. (This depiction is from auction promotional material. Please do not copy or reproduce.)
1770 Attributed to Cosmo Alexander (1724-1772). Girl with a Squirrel. (This depiction is from auction promotional material. Do not copy or reproduce.)
















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