Born in England, Alice Coutts is best known for her paintings of Indian children and shows the influence of one of her teachers, Grace Carpenter Hudson with whom her work was sometimes confused. She also did landscapes and still life.

As a child, she was taken to Australia by her parents, Charles and Maria Hobbs, but her art studies began when she was a teenager in Paris at the Academie Julian under Jules Lefebvre. While there, she married artist Gordon Coutts, who was an instructor at the Art Society of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Without her parents' approval she married him in San Francisco in 1904, and the next year they went on a world tour. Then they moved to San Francisco in 1906, but lost...