As the eldest of four sons of the wood engraver, Timothy Cole, Alphaeus Cole was largely raised in Europe where his father was executing a commission from the Century Company to make an extensive series of reproductions of old master paintings. The family went abroad in 1883, living first in Florence, where Alphaeus began his studies in drawing. They spent periods in various other Italian cities, including Venice, and in Holland, Spain, France and England. In Paris, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Acad‚mie Julian under Jean Paul Laurens and Jean Benjamin-Constant.
Cole exhibited his first picture, Dante Watching the Building of the Florentine Cathedral, at the Paris Salon of 1900; the following year the same painting received an honorable mention at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York. At about this time he moved to London, where he established a successful practice as a portaitist, and was an exhibitor in the Royal Academy shows. In 1908 married the English sculptress, Margaret Ward Wamsley.
Cole returned to New York in 1911, where he continued to pursue his work in portraiture, and became active in the New York art scene. He first visited the Old Lyme, Connecticut, art colony in the 1920s, drawn there by his friendship with Eugene Higgins. Shortly after he bought a home there which was his summer residence and workplace thereafter to 1979 when it burned. Cole was so associated with the town that he was made honorary dean of the Old Lyme Academy of Fine Arts.
He had first been represented in an Academy annual exhibition in 1910, and he rarely missed showing with the Academy every year through 1973, the last annual to which he submitted work. In 1922 an exhibition of his decorative portraits was given by the Braus Gallery; the latest one-man exhibitions of his work were presented by the Clayton and Liberatore Art Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York, in 1971 and 1980.
Cole taught still life and portrait painting at the Cooper Union from 1924 to 1931, and at the Grand Central School of Art from 1927 to 1929. He served as president of the New York Water Color Club from 1931 to 1941, and president of the Allied Artists of America from 1952 to 1953. The Academy elected Cole its recording secretary from 1949 to 1951, and returned him to the Council for a three-year term in 1962.
Cole survived his first wife, and in 1961 married Anita Rio Higgins, widow of Eugene Higgins; she died in 1973. He made his home at the Chelsea Hotel in New York from 1963, and it was there he died at the age of 112.
