Alice Pike Barney (born Alice Pike; January 14, 1857– October 12, 1931) 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 Baháʼí writer Laura Clifford Barney.
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Early life
Barney's 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 Pike's Opera House. His father was a German Jew, and his mother a Dutch Christian. Alice Pike Barney's mother was of French descent. After the family moved to 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 father's cultural interests; as a child she showed talent as a singer and pianist.
At 17 she became engaged to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Alice's mother considered the match unsuitable due to the age difference – she was 17, he 33 – and insisted that they wait to marry. While he was away on a three-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 the wealthy Eliam Eliakim Barney, a manufacturer of railway cars, Barney and Smith Car Company, in Dayton, Ohio.