Alexander Roche – Wikipedia
Alexander Ignatius Roche (Born August 17, 1863 in Glasgow, † March 10, 1921 in Edinburgh) was a Scottish painter of late impressionism and a member of the Glasgow Boys, an artist group from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Alexander Roche, born in 1863 as the son of a hat maker, visited the St Mungo’s Academy. He then started training as an architect in an architecture firm, which he did not complete. In addition, he took some courses on the Glasgow School of Art. 1881 to Paris and visited the Académie Julian, where he was taught by Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. He later wrote on the École des Beaux-Art and was a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme. During his stay in Paris, he met other Scottish artists, including John Lavery, Thomas Millie Dow, William Stott and William Kennedy. Together they painted, influenced by Jules Bastien-Lepage and the open-air painters, at Grez-sur-Lling south of Fontainebleau.
In 1885 he returned to Scotland and initially settled in Glasgow as a freelance artist. He painted romantic idylls with girls in gardens, interiors and landscapes. One of these pictures, The Dominie’s Favourites , was exhibited in 1885 at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and awarded the high amount of £ 250 as a purchase price. Roche moved into a cottage on the banks of the Luggie River in East Dunbartonshire near Edinburgh and painted some of his best landscapes there. A well -known picture from this time is The Shepherd . He was elected member of the Glasgow Art Club and was soon one of the well -known members of the Glasgow Boys.
In 1888 he spent most of the time on Capri, where he was connected to an international group of artists, including Fabio Fabbi and Harold Speed. On two other trips to Italy in the early 1890s, which led him to Florence and Venice, he painted numerous genres and portraits of locals such as A Sabine Woman and Italian Peasant Girl . In Florence he married an Italian girl. The connection was not permanent. Roche also spent some time in the United States. There he painted Andrew Carnegie, one of the then richest people in the world, and his wife Louise and daughter Margaret.
In 1891, Roche was awarded a gold medal in Munich and included in the New English Art Club. In 1892 he received recognition from the Salon de Paris. In 1894, the Royal Scottish Academy Roche elected “Associate” and recorded it as a full member six years later. In 1896 Roche moved to Edinburgh and painted a number of portraits, which was very accommodating. In later years, portrait painting became its main source of income. In 1897 he was awarded a gold medal in Dresden. His paintings were regularly shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London between 1890 and 1919. In 1898 he became a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. The Grosvenor Gallery in London, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Manchester City Art Gallery also exhibited his work.
In 1906 Roche married Jean Alexander, the daughter of the painter Robert Alexander and sister of Edwin Alexander, who was also a painter. All four were friendly with Joseph Crawhall, a member of the Glasgow Boys, with whom they shared a preference for tango in Morocco. The couple lived in Edinburgh, Royal Terrace 8 from 1907 to 1914, during this time he suffered a brain bleeding, as a result of his right hand remained paralyzed. He learned to paint with his left hand and made it to as great as much as the right as before. Finally, the couple acquired a cottage in Slateford at the Water of Leith southwest of Edinburgh, where Roche died in 1921 at the age of 59.
- The Dominie’s Favourites (1885)
- The Shepherd (1886)
- The Idyll (1892)
- A Sabine Woman (1894)
- Italian Peasant Girl
- The Looking Glass
- The Harbour, St. Monance
- Portrait of Flora Stevenson (1904)
- David Martin: The Glasgow school of painting. George Bell Books, London 1897.
- Richard Muther: History of English painting. Fischer, Berlin 1903.
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