Alice learned to love the arts from her father, who owned Pike's Opera House in Cincinnati. In the summer of 1882, Alice Barney and her family stayed at New York's Long Beach Hotel, coinciding with Oscar Wilde's stay. A day spent with Wilde on the beach inspired Alice to pursue art seriously, despite her husband's disapproval. In 1887, she relocated to Paris and enrolled her daughters in a French boarding school founded by the feminist educator Marie Souvestre. Alice studied painting with Carolus-Duran and Claudio Castelucho, later joining James McNeill Whistler's Académie Carmen. When her daughter Natalie wrote a collection of French poetry, Alice provided illustrations, unaware that the love poems were addressed to women and that the models posing for her paintings were Natalie's lovers. Her husband read about the book in a newspaper article titled "Sappho Sings in Washington". He rushed to Paris, where he bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and insisted that Barney and Natalie return with him to America. His drinking increased, as did his blood pressure, and two months later he had a heart attack. Alice would go on to have successful solo art shows and worked to promote the arts in Washington, D.C. She also wrote and performed plays and operas. In 1911, at age 53, Alice married 23-year-old Christian Hemmick, the son of the ambassador to Switzerland. Their engagement resulted in worldwide press attention. Alice's daughter Natalie returned to Paris after her father died. She hosted a salon at her home in Paris for more than 60 years, bringing together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures such as art collector Peggy Guggenheim, writers Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Rainer Maria Rilke, painters Tamara de Lempicka and Marie Laurencin and dancer Isadora Duncan.