Alice

The Alice named on the base of this bust refers to the sitter, Alice Pike Barney, an artist, playwright, and art patron who lived in Washington. On a trip to Rome at age seventeen, she met the sculptor Louis-Auguste Malempre at an exhibition of his marble portrait busts. He invited her to his studio for a small party and she commissioned him to do a portrait of her. The sculptor engraved small dots and lines, called stippling, to create the decorative lace at the top of her dress.