Alice’s Artistic Retreat

Alice Pike Barney, a creative New Woman

Along Sheridan Circle, in the heart of Embassy Row, stands a 1902 mansion designed by Waddy Wood for Alice Pike Barney. The mansion would become the Alice Pike Barney Studio House, part of the Smithsonian Institute until it was sold in 1999. Today, it hosts the Embassy of Latvia.

Alice Pike was born in Ohio and inherited a passion for the arts from her distiller father. She pursued singing and piano before turning her attention to painting. At age 17, she shockingly became engaged to 33-year-old explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But when Stanley went on a journey to Africa on The Lady Alice – a boat named for his intended –Alice ended up marrying another man named Albert Barney.

Alice had been keen to continue her artistic studies after marriage, but Albert wanted no such thing. So she tried to ignore her artistic passions – until a chance encounter with Oscar Wilde in 1882 convinced her to pursue her art, regardless of her husband’s wishes.

Alice embraced her role as a “New Woman.” She traveled extensively through Europe with her daughters, taking art classes and joining the salon set. She had her daughters educated at a feminist boarding school in France, and they grew up to be as free-spirited as Alice. When her daughter Natalie published a book of poems, Alice provided the illustrations, unaware that the poems were of a sapphic nature, and the women she had painted were her daughter’s lovers. When news of the scandal reached DC. Albert went to Europe, destroyed copies of the book, and brought his wife home.

Albert died in 1902, just as Alice finished work on her new mansion. She would use the mansion as her base of artistic operations, hosting parties, salons, artists, and theater groups, and frequently showcased her own work, a legacy her daughters continued after her death. You can see many of Alice’s paintings in the Smithsonian American Art Museum today.

Address 2306 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008, www.siarchives.si.edu/ blog/alice-pike-barney-studio-house | Getting there Metro to Dupont Circle (Red Line); bus N6 to Sheridan Circle & Massachusetts Avenue NW | Hours Viewable from the outside only | Tip Walk over to Hank’s Oyster Bar’s Dupont Circle location for oysters and crab cakes. Chef and restaurateur Jamie Leeds named the signature restaurant for her father (1624 Q Street NW, www.hanksoysterbar.com/dupont-circle-menu).