Alexander Pope Jr Biography | Oil Paintings

As a youth, Alexander Pope Jr. (the artist) carved and sketched animals around his home in Massachusetts. During the Civil War years, Pope stayed close to home. He began working for his father's timber business in the late 1860s, and it is during this time that Alexander Pope Jr. first began to immerse himself more into art. Pope studied carving, painting, perspective, and anatomy with the Romantic painter William Rimmer, an influential teacher of many Boston artists and he also studied for a short time under William Copley. It was at this time, during the early 1870s, that he became familiar with the art school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He published two sets of chromolithograph versions of his watercolor paintings, Upland Game Birds and Water Fowl of the United States, and Celebrated Dogs of America.

From 1879 to 1883, Alexander Pope Jr. created many well-received carvings of game, Czar Alexander III of Russia bought two of the carvings. All through the late 1880s, he painted large trompe l’oeil still lifes, the same way William Michael Harnett and John Frederick Peto painted. Pope reproduced realistic images of hunting and military scenes in such a way as to trick the viewers’ eyes into perceiving a painting as three-dimensional. This was a highly popular means of creating extremely realistic still lifes. Starting in 1893, Pope began painting animal portraits and, later, pursued a career as a portrait painter. He was a member of the Copley Art Association of Boston in the late nineteenth century.

Art Movement: Naturalism.
Artists InfluencingAlexander Pope Jr.: William Copley, William Rimmer.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.