Alexander Pope (1849-1924)
Alexander Pope (1849-1924)
Alexander Pope enjoyed a successful career as an animal sculptor and painter, earning admiration and praise for his trompe l’oeil still lifes of game birds and his portraits of hunting dogs with their quarry.
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Born in 1849 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Pope began working in his family’s lumber business, where it is surmised that he first experimented with wood carving; his detailed reliefs of ducks, quail, pheasants, and other game, inspired by his own enjoyment of the hunt, found eager collectors. Explorations with drawing and painting would follow and while he likely studied briefly with Boston artist William Rimmer, Pope is considered largely self-taught. In 1878, a portfolio of chromolithographs of his watercolors titled Upland Game Birds and Water Fowl of the United States was published, followed four years later by a second portfolio, Celebrated Dogs of America. By the mid-1880s, he was working as both a sculptor and painter, and had earned high society commissions in New England and New York for depictions of hunting trophies and for portraits of the owners’ beloved setters, pointers, and other sporting canines. Yet it wasn’t until 1886 that he made his full-fledged mark as a fine artist with the unveiling of Calling out the Hounds, a massive canvas painted in collaboration with Emil Carlsen (who completed the landscape portion), which was shown in Boston and New York.
By 1912, Pope had abandoned his trompe l’oeil work to concentrate on animal portraiture, and had moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, while keeping a studio in Boston. He maintained other connections to the city, including membership in the Copley Society and the Boston Art Club, having exhibited intermittently with the latter between 1875 and 1898. Pope passed away in 1924 and today his sculpture and paintings are found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Diego Museum of Art, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.
