Alice Pike Barney (born Alice Pike; 1857–1931): Todays TML Arts Artist Birthday, and someone I am enjoying learning more about. What sassy, fun character she was. (y) Alice Pike Barney was an American painter. She was active in Washington, D.C. and worked to make Washington into a center of the arts. Her two daughters were the writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney and the Baháí writer Laura Clifford Barney. Barneys father Samuel Napthali Pike, who had made his fortune as the distiller of Magnolia brand whiskey, was a patron of the arts in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he built Pikes Opera House. After the family moved New York City in 1866, he built what would become the Grand Opera House at Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue. Barney was the youngest of four children and the only one who fully shared her fathers cultural interests; as a child she showed talent as a singer and pianist. At 17 she became engaged to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, the man who discovered Dr. Livingstone in Africa. Her family did not approve of the match and Barney married someone her family found more acceptable while Stanley was away on a two-year expedition in Africa (he named the boat in which he circled Lake Victoria The Lady Alice). She instead married Albert Clifford Barney, son of a wealthy manufacturer of railway cars in Dayton, Ohio. In 1882 Barney and her family spent the summer at New Yorks Long Beach Hotel, where Oscar Wilde happened to be speaking on his American lecture tour. Wilde spent the day with Alice and her daughter Natalie on the beach; their conversation changed the course of Alices life, inspiring her to pursue art seriously despite her husbands disapproval. In 1887 she travelled to Paris. While there, she studied painting with Carolus-Duran. She returned to Paris in 1896 and resumed her study with Carolus-Duran as well as taking lessons from the Spanish painter Claudio Castelucho. When James Abbott McNeill Whistler opened an academie, she was one of the first students. Whistler soon lost interest in teaching art and the school shut down, but he was a formative influence. In 1899 she began a salon at her rented home on the Avenue Victor Hugo; regular guests included the Symbolist painters Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, John White Alexander, and Edmond Aman-Jean, and her art began to show a Symbolist influence. When Natalie wrote a chapbook of French poetry, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women), Barney was pleased to provide illustrations. She did not understand the implications of the books love poems addressed to women and had no idea that three of the four women who modeled for her were her daughters lovers. Albert, alerted to the books theme by a newspaper review headlined Sappho Sings in Washington, rushed to Paris, where he bought and destroyed the publishers remaining stock and printing plates and insisted that Barney and Natalie return with him to the familys summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine. His temper only worsened when friends forwarded him clippings from the Washington Mirror. Washington, about to publish its first Social Register, was becoming more socially stratified, and Barneys background as the daughter of a whiskey distiller and granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant had made her the subject of vague insinuations in the society pages. The gossip would have no lasting effect on the Barneys social standing, but Albert considered it a disaster. His drinking increased, as did his blood pressure, and two months later he had a heart attack. His health continued to deteriorate, and he died in 1902. Barney had solo shows at major galleries including the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In later years, she invented and patented mechanical devices, wrote and performed in several plays and an opera, and worked to promote the arts in Washington, D.C. Many of her paintings are now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1911, at age 53, Barney married 23-year-old Christian Hemmick; their engagement resulted in worldwide press attention. They had divorced by 1920. Alice died of a heart attack in 1931, and is buried at Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 16:46:56 +0000