‘Deer shooting at a Portage – Canada 1831’; and ‘A Canadian Settler House – 1831’

Born in Stirling, Alexander was educated at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, and at Sandhurst, and soldiered in India, Burma, Persia and the Balkans in the 1820s. He was promoted to Captain in 1830, went on half pay and toured the Americas, publishing his Transatlantic Sketches illustrated with his drawings in 1833. After travels to Portugal, South America and service in South Africa in the 6th Frontier War he was knighted in 1841, and in the same year returned to Canada on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces. His second tour of Canada written up in his L’Acadie; or seven years’ exploration in British North America, in 1849.