{{Short description|British artist and illustrator}} {{EngvarB|date=November 2017}} {{Use dmy dates|date=November 2017}} '''Isabel Alexander''' (1910–1996) was a British artist and illustrator whose work encompassed drawing, water colour, oils, lithography, lino-printing and three-dimensional work, and whose output ranged from socially-engaged documentation of the lives and work of Welsh coalminers, Irish fishermen and English farmworkers through book illustration to landscapes, seascapes and abstracts.<ref name="IPress">{{Cite web|url=http://www.isartpress.com/isabel-alexander-artist-and-illustrator.html|title=Isabel Alexander: artist and illustrator|website=Isart Press|access-date=16 February 2017|archive-date=16 February 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170216214303/http://www.isartpress.com/isabel-alexander-artist-and-illustrator.html|url-status=dead}}</ref> Like many other women artists of her generation she struggled during her lifetime for opportunity and recognition in a field that was overwhelmingly male and her significance has only belatedly begun to be acknowledged.<ref name="Bridge">{{Cite web|url=http://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/copyright-news/now-representing-isabel-alexander?dm_t=0,0,0,0,0|title=Now representing: Isabel Alexander|publisher=bridgemanimages.com|access-date=16 February 2017}}</ref><ref name="IPress"/><ref name="NEcho">{{Cite web|url=http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/entertainment/15025875.Some_talk_of_Alexander/|title=Some talk of Alexander|website=The Northern Echo|date=16 January 2017 |access-date=16 February 2017}}</ref>
== Biography == Born in Birmingham, Alexander attended King Edward's High School for Girls before training first at Birmingham School of Art (1929–33) and then the Slade School of Fine Arts in London (1934–35), where she won a prize for life drawing.<ref name="JaneMcK"/> In 1939 she married the Scottish documentary film director Donald Alexander. The couple separated in 1941 after the birth of their son, propelling Isabel Alexander into a decade of financial hardship and lone parenting aggravated by the privations of the war years. Despite this, she managed to combine part-time teaching with working as an art director on documentary, educational, medical and information films and undertaking various book illustration projects and commissions.<ref name="IPress"/>
In Alexander's early work drawing was paramount, and after her time in documentary film it provided the impetus for an alternative documentary response to people and conditions in the South Wales coalfield during the wartime years before nationalisation, a project in which she was encouraged by film-maker Paul Rotha. Some of the striking portraits and landscapes from her extended visits to Rhondda in 1943, 1944 and 1945 appeared as illustrations to ''Miner's Day'' by B. L. Coombes and publications on post-war social and industrial reconstruction. After this, and exploiting her extensive botanical knowledge, she consolidated her work as an illustrator. She wrote and autolithographed ''The Story of Plant Life'', one of the celebrated Puffin Picture Books, and embarked on a range of other illustration projects, developing her lithographic skill with the help of Barnett Freedman.<ref name="JaneMcK"/><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.penguinfirsteditions.com/index.php?cat=CoversAB|title=Penguin First Editions :: Early First Edition Penguin Books :: penguinfirsteditions.com|publisher=penguinfirsteditions.com|access-date=16 February 2017}}</ref>
In 1949 Alexander at last gained financial security as a trainer of art teachers at Saffron Walden Teachers' Training College, and was able to move from work undertaken in part to make ends meet to a succession of phases of creative experimentation. While never forsaking line, she turned from illustration to paint, colour and form on a larger scale, and during the next forty years produced distinctive and often dramatic landscapes and seascapes interspersed by portraiture and forays into abstraction. The result was an impressive and remarkably varied body of sketches, studies, drawings, paintings and prints.<ref name="JaneMcK"/><ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/isabel-alexander-creative-spirit-in-harrogate-1-8328693|title=Isabel Alexander: Creative spirit in Harrogate|newspaper=Yorkshire Evening Post|access-date=16 February 2017}}</ref>
Alexander travelled extensively in Britain and continental Europe, though during the latter part of her life spent more and more time in Scotland's Hebridean islands. After attending the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and Hitler's notorious Exhibition of 'Degenerate Art' in Munich in 1937, she became an avid and lifelong exhibition-goer, retaining a strong international outlook and a particular interest in European and American modernism.<ref name="Bridge"/><ref name="JaneMcK">{{Cite book|title=Isabel Alexander: artist and illustrator|last=McKenzie|first=Janet|publisher=Isart Press|year=2017|isbn=9781527203624}}</ref> The sheer variety of her work, and the influences she documented in her publication Sources of 20th Century Art, run counter to later attempts to pigeon-hole her as a typical small-scale English landscape painter.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Sources of 20th Century Art|last=Alexander|first=Isabel|publisher=Mimeo|year=1996}}</ref>
During her lifetime there were 36 public exhibitions of Alexander's work, 27 of them joint and nine solo. Most of her works are in private collections, mainly in Britain but also in Australia, the United States and China. There are also public holdings at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea, the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, the University of Cambridge and – as result of her submissions to the Pictures for Schools exhibitions at the Royal Academy during the 1960s and 1970s – several schools and local councils.
In 2017, three events combined to renew and extend interest in Alexander's work: a major biographical and artistic book-length study by Janet McKenzie;<ref name="JaneMcK"/> a retrospective exhibition at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.harrogate.gov.uk/info/20152/mercer_art_gallery/704/exhibitions_at_the_mercer_art_gallery|title=Exhibitions at the Mercer Art Gallery|last=Cryer|first=Clare|publisher=Government of the United Kingdom|access-date=16 February 2017}}</ref> and the addition of images of over 70 of her works to the Bridgeman Images international on-line art library.<ref name="Bridge"/> In 2022, her Rhondda mining portraits featured in the exhibition ''Art and Industry: stories from South Wales'' at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Art and Industry, Stories from South Wales |url=https://www.glynnvivian.co.uk/whats-on/art-industry-stories-from-south-wales/ |access-date=2025-05-15 |website=www.glynnvivian.co.uk}}</ref> Other exhibitions are currently being planned.
In 2021, over 70 of Alexander’s Rhondda drawings, lithographs and paintings were brought together for a new edition of the B.L.Coombes classic ''Miner’s Da''y (for which she had provided the original illustrations in 1945). In the new book, edited and introduced by Peter Wakelin, Coombes’s text and Alexander’s images are given equal treatment.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|title=Miner's Day: B. L. Coombes, with Rhondda Images by Isabel Alexander (Hardback)|url=https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/miners-day-hardback|access-date=2021-10-29|website=Parthian Books|language=en}}</ref> Many of the 1940s Rhondda images were featured in the 2024 book ''Rhondda Portraits'', this time in combination with a 1944 commentary by Donald Alexander which was discovered only recently in his archive at the National Library of Scotland.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |last=Press |first=Grey Mare |title=Rhondda Portraits: Images by Isabel Alexander, Commentary by Donald Alexander |url=https://greymarepress.bigcartel.com/product/rhondda-portraits-images-by-isabel-alexander-commentary-by-donald-alexander |access-date=2024-08-05 |website=Grey Mare Press}}</ref>
== Publications == * Alexander, Isabel and Alexander, Donald, edited by Robin Alexander (2024) Rhondda Portraits, Grey Mare Press.<ref name=":1" /> * Coombes, B.L., with Rhondda images by Isabel Alexander, edited by Peter Wakelin (2021) ''Miner's Day''. Cardigan, Parthian Press.<ref name=":0" /> * Alexander, Isabel (1996) ''Sources of 20th Century Art''. Mimeo. * Alexander, Isabel (1947) ''Comment Vivent les Plantes''. Paris: Collection du Vieux Chamois. * Alexander, Isabel (1946), ''The Story of Plant Life''. London: Puffin Picture Books.<ref>{{Cite news |title=Bridgeman Education |url=https://www.bridgemaneducation.com/en/creator/43999/summary |access-date=16 February 2017 |newspaper=Bridgeman Education}}</ref> * Durham University History Department, illustrated by Isabel Alexander (1946), ‘Coal: the national black spot’, ''Future Books'' 1. * Coombes, B.L., illustrated by Isabel Alexander (1945), ''Miner’s Day''. London: Penguin
== References == {{reflist}}
==Further reading== * McKenzie, J. (2017) ''[https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/isabel-alexander-artist-and-illustrator?_pos=1&_sid=0555fb642&_ss=r Isabel Alexander: artist and illustrator]'', Parthian Books. * Artist Biographies (2017) ‘Isabel Alexander, 1910-1996’ in ''British and Irish Artists of the 20th Century''. * Bradbury, N. (2017) ''Pictures for Schools: Isabel Alexander'', https://picturesforschools.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/isabel-alexander-1910-1996-artist-and-illustrator-mercer-art-gallery-harrogate/ * Strachan, W.J. (1952), ‘Isabel Alexander’, ''The Studio'', Vol 143. * ''Wales Arts Review'', November 2022, ''[https://www.walesartsreview.org/isabel-alexander-artist-and-illustrator/ Isabel Alexander: artist and illustrator]'' * New Welsh Review (2025) Isabel Alexander: Rhondda mining portraits from the 1940s. ''New Welsh Review 137.''
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Alexander, Isabel}} Category:1910 births Category:1996 deaths Category:20th-century British printmakers Category:20th-century English women artists Category:Artists from Birmingham, West Midlands Category:Alumni of the Birmingham School of Art Category:Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Category:English printmakers Category:People educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham Category:British women printmakers