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Alice Blair Thomas (née Pollard) was born in Collingwood, Ontario in 1857. After receiving primary education from a governess, she went on to study at Bishop Strachan’s School in Toronto. She married Richard Thomas in 1887 and they remained in Toronto where she was active in the arts for the first decades of the twentieth century. She exhibited at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1901, 1904 and 1916. In 1916 she and her husband moved to the West, where she continued her work as an artist in Vancouver, British Columbia. Thomas worked largely in oil and watercolour as a genre, landscape and Western artist.
In 1917 the couple moved to Los Angeles, California. Thomas became active in the local art scene, exhibiting portraits and landscapes at the Pasadena Art Institute in the late 1920s and with the California Art Club. She also travelled through Washington State where she painted the Olympic Mountains, and continued to spend time in Canada even after her move to the United States. She was a founding member of the British Columbia Society of Fine Arts in 1933. Alice Blair Thomas died in Los Angeles in 1945.