Alice Barber Stephens

Alice Barber Stephens (July 1, 1858 – July 13, 1932) was an American painter and engraver, best remembered for her illustrations. Her work regularly appeared in magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The Ladies Home Journal.

Early life and education Alice Barber was born near Salem, New Jersey. She was the eighth of nine children born to Samuel Clayton Barber and Mary Owen, who were Quakers.

She attended local schools until she and her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At age 15 she became a student at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design), where she studied wood engraving. She was admitted to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876 (the first year women were admitted), studying under Thomas Eakins. Among her fellow students at the Academy were Susan MacDowell, Frank Stephens, David Wilson Jordan, Lavinia Ebbinghausen, Thomas Anshutz, and Charles H. Stephens (whom she would marry). Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives." As women began to work, their career choices broadened and illustration became a commendable occupation. People's ideas about education and art started to merge, and the outcome of a certain sensitivity to the arts began to be seen as uplifting and educational. By using illustration as a means to further their practices, women were able to fit the traditional gender role while still being active in their pursuits for the "New Woman". According to Rena Robey of Art Times, "The early feminists began to leave the home to participate in clubs as moral and cultural guardians, focused on cleaning up cities and helping African Americans, impoverished women, working children, immigrants, and other previously ignored groups." Stephens took advantage of the explosion of illustration opportunities, including the opportunity to work from home.

Women's education Edwin Forrest House, formerly the home of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Throughout the period before the civil war, textile and other decorative work became acceptable occupations for those who aspired to be in the middle class. It began as a charitable effort to train needy and deserving young women in textile and wallpaper design, wood engraving, and other salable artistic skills, providing a means for training women who needed wage work.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), established in 1805 by painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale, sculptor William Rush, and other artists and business leaders. Although they both taught art and design, PAFA and the Philadelphia School of Design For Women were not of equal social importance; the School of Design remained clearly lower in the city's cultural hierarchy, both because it was a women's school and because it was dedicated to commercial art instead of the fine arts. Stephens' connection with Harper's began in approximately 1882, as it printed the work of American artists and writers, such as Winslow Homer and Mark Twain. Much of her work was published in Harper's Young People (later known as Harper's Round Table).

By the mid-1880s, however, Stephens' pace of work began to affect her health.

Upon her return from Europe, Stephens resumed her illustration career with contributions to the Ladies' Home Journal and several book projects for Houghton Mifflin and Crowell publishers.

Educator In 1888, she began to teach courses at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Around the same time, with artist and educator Emily Sartain, she was one of the founders and officers of The Plastic Club of Philadelphia (1897), the oldest art club for women in continuous existence. Her painting The Germania Orchestra at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1891) is now among the collection of the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware. During the mid-1890s, following the development of the halftone process, Stephens started to use more varied media, including watercolor, for her illustrations. That year, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Stark Munro Letters was published, which was illustrated by Stephens. She illustrated Mary E. Wilkins' The People of Our Neighborhood, which was published in 1898.

In 1899, Stephens was invited to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but she declined the offer due to poor health.

Stephens continued to work as a renowned illustrator and completed illustrations for the 1903 edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

In the later part of her career, in the 1920s, Stephens' illustrations were made of mostly washes or charcoal with washes. She painted landscapes and portraits of Quakers and Pennsylvania Germans.

Personal life and death

In June 1890, Stephens married Charles Hallowell Stephens (1855–1931), an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

She died in 1932 at Thunderbird Lodge at the age of 74, after having a paralytic stroke. She is buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala-Cynwyd. In 1984, the Brandywine River Museum featured her work in a major exhibition. Her papers are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The collection also consists of correspondence, clippings concerning Stephens' work, nine reproductions of her illustrations, photographs she had taken, an exhibition catalog for the Plastic Club (1898), a booklet about her and three award certificates (1884–1895). These items were donated in 1988 by Stephens’ granddaughter and her husband.

Awards and prizes In 1890, she won the Mary Smith Prize for best painting for a resident woman artist at the annual Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition for her work Portrait of a Boy.

At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, a world's fair in Atlanta held to stimulate trade, she won a bronze medal and in 1899 won a gold medal at an exhibition in Earl's Court, London for her illustration of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Maria Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman. A year later, her illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universalle in Paris.

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