S.H. (Wilhelmina) Alexander (1870 - 1961)
About the Artist:
Wilhelmina Alexander was born on July 2, 1870 in Hamilton, Ontario. She studied art at the Hamilton Art School with S. John Ireland, privately with J.S. Gordon, and later in Montreal with G. Horne Russell. She was president of the Women's Art Association of Canada, Hamilton Branch, from 1925 to 1927. Alexander exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy in 1929 and 1930, with the Women's International Exhibition in Detroit, at their invitation, in 1929, and with the Art Association of Montreal in 1931 and 1935. Alexander held regular widely-attended exhibitions in her home both to show her own work, a collection of still-life, landscapes, marines and flower studies, and to support younger artists. "As a result of her personal fund-raising for the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and because of her similar organizing efforts as a member of the WAA, Mrs. Alexander had the distinction of turning the first sod at the commencement of construction of the new art gallery”, the new purpose-built Gallery, at Forsyth Avenue and Main Street in west Hamilton opened December 1953.
Stuart McCuaig
"Climbing the Cold White Peaks :
a survey of artists in and from Hamilton 1910 -1950"
About the Painting:
Sunflowers, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, suggests a slight impressionistic influence. Alexander was particularily prolific in producing floral paintings and this one shows her love of colour which she exercised with "sterling discrimination'.
Stuart McCuaig
"Climbing the Cold White Peaks :
a survey of artists in and from Hamilton 1910 -1950"
