![Alexander Harrison - Castles in Spain (Chateaux en Espagne) [c.1882]](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1661/26389763541_eba8877605_o.jpg)
Alexander Harrison (Philadelphia, January 17, 1853 - Paris, October 13, 1930) was an American marine painter who spent most of his career in France. In 1879, he moved to Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Harrison rented a ramshackle cottage near the Brittany town of Beg-Meil, and each evening raced to the dunes to watch the sun set over the ocean. In late-summer 1896, he was joined there by struggling writer Marcel Proust and composer Reynaldo Hahn.
[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 94.9 x 187.3 cm]