Alice Stoddard was the daughter of a clergyman; she was sent to boarding school at the age of thirteen. She began summering on Monhegan Island, Maine, in her youth. She stayed with her aunt, Sarah Kent, mother of Rockwell Kent.
Stoddard studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (1903-1910). She won the Cresson Travelling Scholarships three times (1905, 1906, 1907) but declined the third awards. She opened a portrait studio in Philadelphia on the adivce of her teacher William Merrit Chase. During World War I she served with the YMCA in France. In 1943 she took a course in drafting at Drexel Institute of Technology and then designed stainless steel airplanes for the E.G. Budd Company in Philadelphia during World War II. She purchased a home on Monhegan Island in 1946, and married Joseph Pearson, a life-long friend and instructor at the PAFA, on Monhegan Island in 1948.
Stoddard was primarily a portrait painter, preferring children as subjects. She also painted landscapes, harbor and boat scenes, cliffs and breaking tides at Monhegan. Her portraits are in the style of Robert Henri and her landscapes are impressionistic.
