MacMonnies, Alice Jones, 1875-

Biography

Alice Jones MacMonnies (1875-c.1963) was the eldest daughter of Nevada Senator John P. Jones (1829-1912) and his second wife Georgina Sullivan Jones (1853-1936), also called Bonnie. Alice had a half-brother, Roy, from her father’s first marriage and two full-sisters, Marion (sometimes spelled Marian) Jones Farquhar (1879-1965), a renowned tennis player who won the U.S. Championship in 1899 and 1902 and was an Olympic medalist in 1900, and Georgina Jones Walton (1882-1955), who was also an Olympic tennis player (she also joined the Vedanta Society as Sister Daya, was a close confidant of Swami Paramanada, and wrote the play The Light of Asia, which was turned into a show choreographed by Ruth St. Denis). Alice graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1896. Like her mother, who had been raised in France, Alice had an affinity for music and the arts, and moved to Paris to train her voice. In her late twenties she began studying art with American sculptor Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937). The two were married in Switzerland in 1910 (MacMonnies divorced his first wife, artist Mary Louise Fairchild, in 1909) and lived in Giverny, France, until the outbreak of World War I, when they returned to the United States and settled in New York. Alice spent part of 1917 in California to help settle disputes over her father’s estate. The MacMonnies lost most of their assets in the 1929 stock market crash, and lived primarily off of Frederick MacMonnies’ sculpture commissions until his death in 1937. Alice never remarried and died in the early 1960s.