Elected ARSA: 13 November 1878
Elected RSA: 10 February 1888
The animal painter, Robert Alexander RSA, was born in 1840 in Dalgarven. One can glean from Alexander’s unique career path that he was driven and talented from a young age. Instead of attending art classes, at around 1854, he apprenticed for a house painter and decorator in Irvine. Whoever the master was, it was from him that Alexander learned to paint landscapes. By 1860, he was employed in the workshops of the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, now part of the National Museums of Scotland.
1868 proved to be a pivotal year in Alexander’s career. Not only did oil painting become his full-time profession, it is also when he began exhibiting at the RSA. This was only the beginning: he displayed a recorded 125 works there over the course of his life. While Alexander exhibited at the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Royal Academy and the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, now the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, the RSA was without doubt the most important institution to his career. He mostly painted dogs and horses and some of these featured clearly the subject’s personality as well as an expressiveness and vibrancy that was distinctive for animal painting. One of his seven children, John Edwin Alexander RSA (1870-1926) was also to become a successful artist. Robert was elected ARSA in 1878 and RSA in 1888. Wat and Wearie, which is full of expressive paint strokes, served as his Diploma Work. His death in Edinburgh during the year 1923 was reportedly a surprise despite his age as his talents had not declined considerably.
