The son of a farmer, Francis Alexander was born in Killingly, Connecticut, on February 3, 1800. Brought up on a farm, he taught himself using colorings, and in 1820 went to New York City and learned painting with Alexander Robertson.

He spent the winters of 1831 and 1832 in Rome. Later on, he resided for nearly a decade in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had tremendous fashion, and where he completed a portrait of Charles Dickens (1842).

In 1840 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an honorary member. There is a tradition that when Dickens visited Boston, a line of New England portraitists was already fawning on shore, hoping to be the first to capture the great novelist's image on the canvas. But Francis Alexander reached the writer well ahead of his peers—by traveling in a small advance boat to greet Dickens as his vessel entered the harbor. American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would later coin the verb, Alexander, sniffing that such and such a person had Alexander his way into a highly coveted invitation to a party. later he died in 1881 in Florence.

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