Alice Pike Barney

Alice Pike Barney came to serious painting late and pursued it against considerable social resistance. She trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran and Whistler, and their influence is visible in the loose handling and low toned backgrounds of her portraits.

She was wealthy, and used it. In Washington she built Barney Studio House as a centre for the arts, campaigned for a national theatre, and pushed for the city to take visual art seriously at a time when it largely did not.

Pastel suited her best. The portraits of her daughters, including the writer Natalie Clifford Barney, are the most alive things she made. The society expectations she was working around are part of the story, and she wrote about them openly enough that the paintings and the life are hard to separate.