Alice Russell Glenny

Alice Russell Glenny
Born	Alice Russell 1858 Detroit, MI
Died	1924 Buffalo, NY
Nationality	American
Education	William Merritt Chase; Gustav Boulanger
Style	Art Nouveau
Spouse(s)	John Clark Glenny

Alice Russell Glenny (1858–1924) was an American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist who lived and worked in Buffalo, New York. Glenny was a fixture of the thriving artistic scene in Buffalo in the early twentieth century. From 1893-1894 and 1903–1904, she served as president of the Buffalo Society of Artists. She studied under top teachers, such as William Merritt Chase and Gustav Boulanger, in both the United States and France, and was considered in her time to be one of the city's top artists. Today, Glenny is best remembered for her Art Nouveau posters and magazine illustrations. Her posters were featured prominently in Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition of 1901, famous for being the location of the shooting of President William McKinley. She also regularly contributed illustrations to the Buffalo-Courier Express, one of the major newspapers in Buffalo at the time.

In 1858, Alice Russell was born in Detroit, Michigan. As a young woman, she moved to New York to study art, where she met and married John Clark Glenny of Buffalo (1859–1909). The couple had two daughters. Living in New York, Glenny trained under American painter and art teacher William Merritt Chase. Traveling to Paris, Glenny also studied with French figure painter Gustav Boulanger.

While also being a muralist and sculptor, Glenny's work as a graphic artist consisted of American Art Nouveau posters. With the development of color lithography, the production of posters was elevated worldwide from what H.C. Bunner had called a "primitive system" in which woodblocks were harshly carved allowing for an imprecision of color and shape. Color lithography provided American advertisers with the means of creating eye-catching and beautifully rendered pictures, often of fashionable women. Poster design in America was influenced by a number of emerging styles from countries such as France and Britain. French poster design, largely influenced by woodblock printing in Japan, was well received in the United States when Harper's Magazine commissioned Franco-Swiss artist Eugène Grasset to create covers in 1889, 1891, 1892, and in April 1893. Exposure to these international styles ignited a "poster craze" in which American graphic designers developed a style commonly "depicting bourgeois scenes" and utilizing more stylized lines filled with blocks of color, similar to the designs of artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha.

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