Alexander Samuel MacLeod

Who was Alexander Samuel MacLeod?

Alexander Samuel MacLeod, also known as A. S. MacLeod, was a painter and printmaker. He was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada on April 12, 1888. MacLeod studied at McGill University. After moving to San Francisco, he continued his artistic training at the California School of Design under Frank Van Sloun. In 1921, MacLeod arrived in Hawaii, where he worked in the art departments of the magazine Paradise of the Pacific and the local papers, The Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. By 1929, he had returned to Canada and resided there for ten years. Again in Hawaii, MacLeod became the director of the graphic art department for the United States Army in the Pacific. In 1943, he published a book of his Hawaiian prints, The Spirit of Hawaii, Before and After Pearl Harbor. MacLeod retired to Palo Alto, California, where he died in 1956.

MacLeod is best known for his Hawaiian landscapes and sympathetic representations of rural Hawaii's native population. The California State Library, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa are among the public collections holding works by Alexander Samuel MacLeod.