Alice Pike Barney's portrait Lucifer (Natalie Clifford Barney) was finished in 1902, and it was donated to the Smithsonian by the subject of the portrait and her sister in memory of their mother, the artist.

With this work, as unusual as it is, Alice Pike Barney joins a long and illustrious tradition of artists who make portraits of their children, including Thomas Gainsborough and Berthe Morisot. 

By 1902, Natalie Clifford Barney's fame was rapidly growing, and she relished the opportunity to be cast in her mother's work, this time as a villain. Alice Pike Barney's more flattering portraits of Natalie Clifford Barney include a regal 1896 piece in which she wears furs and an elaborate headdress.

In Lucifer (Natalie Clifford Barney), the artist "shows very plainly her preference for women as sitters and as the subjects of ideal creations...to Mrs. Barney even the devil is a woman, as we see at once from her "Lucifer." Hell fire may play across these features as it will, rendering as red as roast sinner one part of the face, but ghastly green another; dull glowing points of ruby may shine in Lucifer's eyes--he is a she..."

Surprisingly, Lucifer was originally associated by the Romans with an object of their worship, the planet Venus, symbolizing love, Dionysus, and jealousy. When the Greek New Testament renounced the paganism of the Greeks and Romans, Christian proselytes began to equate Lucifer with the Hebrew Ha-Satan, "the accuser," originally a character in the Book of Job.

It is possible that Alice Pike Barney studied the Talmud Bavli, which, like Plato's Symposium, states that because the human being was created "male and female" in the divine image, the original human being was of both male and female gender. If the divine image is both male and female, it would make sense to portray the "other side," the side of the profane, as either or both genders. And while we're at it, in the original text Eve was Adam's "side," not his rib! One side was Adam, the other side was Chava, "Eve."