Background
Alice Boughton was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on May 14, 1866. She was the daughter of Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a prosperous New York lawyer.
Alice Boughton was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on May 14, 1866. She was the daughter of Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a prosperous New York lawyer.
Alice Boughton attended Miss Rounds' School, which was a private girl's preparatory school. In the 1880s, Alice Boughton began studying art and photography at the Pratt School of Art and Design (now Pratt Institute). It was there that she met fellow student Gertrude Käsebier, with whom she later studied in Paris. Käsebier also employed her an assistant in her studio, most likely at the same time Boughton was studying at Pratt.
In 1890, Alice Boughton opened her own portrait studio on East 23rd Street in New York, which she maintained for the next forty years. In 1904, she sent a letter to William Butler Yeats that listed a studio address on Madison Avenue, indicating that she established or used more than one studio for at least a brief period.
Around 1901, Boughton studied art in Rome and photography in Paris, where she worked in Käsebier’s summer studio. She won an honorable mention for her work at the Turin International Decorative and Fine Arts Exhibition in 1902.
It is not known when Alice Boughton met Alfred Stieglitz, but it is clear he knew of and admired her work by 1902 when he included two of her works in the inaugural exhibition at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York City. Four years later, in 1906, Boughton was appointed by Stieglitz as a Fellow of the Photo-Secession. The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbot and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries. In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called “Photography, A Medium of Expression” published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work (No 26, April, 1909). During this same period, her photographs were included in major exhibitions around the world, including shows in London, Paris, Vienna, The Hague and New York.
Alice Boughton became one of the most distinguished portrait photographers of New York, although she did many landscapes in this country and Europe including the famous Rockefeller estate Kykuit at Pocantico Hills, New York. She produced studies of children, as well as female nudes in allegorical or natural settings. Among her more famous works are portraits of Eugene O'Neill, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Arliss and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was an inspiration for John Singer Sargent's own portrait of the writer.
In 1931, Boughton closed her studio and discarded thousands of prints. She moved permanently to the home in Brookhaven, Long Island. Boughton died of pneumonia on 21 June 1943.
Boughton shared the photographic philosophy of Nadar, a nineteenth-century French master who believed that knowing how to utilize light and reflect personality in photography were based upon feeling and could not be taught.
