Alexander John Drysdale

American, 1870-1934

Born in Marietta Georgia in 1870, Alexander Drysdale came to New Orleans in 1882 because his father had accepted a post as minister of Christ Church in 1883. Drysdale worked for several years as a bank teller, studying painting at night with Paul Poincy (1833–1909). Drysdale enrolled in the Art Student's League in New York in 1901. H studied with prominent modernists Bryson Burroughs, Charles C. Curran, and Frank Vincent DuMonde. Drysdale followed these artists' conservative interpretation of French Impressionism. With few exceptions, he painted landscape subjects for the remainder of his career.

About 1916, Drysdale began diluting oil paint in kerosene and using cotton balls to apply thin skeins of paint, conveying a sense of mood and atmosphere appropriate to the Louisiana bayous and swamps. Drysdale achieved a measure of fame in the early 1920s, a progenitor of the French Quarter art school that persists to this day. He sold paintings to passing tourists in Jackson Square, at art galleries on Royal and Magazine Streets, and managed a local following—it is said that brides commonly received a painting by Drysdale on their wedding day. Accounts abound of Drysdale's predilection for strong drink. Prolific, especially in his later years, Drysdale painted an estimated 10,000 canvases, or about one painting a day throughout his thirty-year career.