Musée No:379.018
Regular price £25.00The Traveller
Artist: Alice Pike Barney
Date:1909
Alice Pike Barney (1857-1931) is an absolutely fascinating American artist and her life far too interesting to be squeezed into a couple of paragraphs, so unusually I have split it up between several paintings (379.005, 379.018, 379.019, 379.020, 379.021 & 325.185). If you would like to find out more pop the number or her name in the search box at the top of the page, I hope you enjoy discovering more about her fascinating life.
PART 3/6
At 17 she was engaged to be married to the besotted and very famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley of ‘Mr Livingstone I presume fame?’ ! Her mother didn’t approve of the match as he was 33 and insisted that they wait before getting married. Stanley left for a three-year expedition to Africa, he even named the boat he explored Lake Victoria with after her, ‘The Lady Alice’. They were very much in love and he wrote every day but for Alice out of sight was out of mind and she didn’t open all of his letters. She tied them together in a blue ribbon and put them in a trunk in the basement for safe keeping. (As a side note to the main story Stanley arrived in Zanzibar in late1877 to find letters Alice had written two years before telling of her marriage to Barney and the birth of their daughter – Stanley fell into a deep depression and didn’t reply to her. Two years later he sent her a copy of his book “Through the Dark Continent”, with a note that without her inspiration he could never have achieved his accomplishment. "Africa has been conquered," he wrote, "and it is you, not I, have conquered it. With love in my heart, I lay it at your feet, Lady Alice.")