Alice Mary Hagen was a Canadian ceramic artist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was trained in china painting, and earned her living through selling painted chinaware and teaching. She was among the artists selected to paint plates for the 1897 Canadian Historical Dinner Service. She gained a high reputation for the quality of her work, for which she won various prizes. She married happily and had two daughters. She continued to paint china while raising her family in Canada and Jamaica. When she was about sixty and her husband had retired she learned to make pottery at her studio in Nova Scotia, and was a pioneer of studio pottery in the area. She continued to produce and sell painted pottery until she was aged 93. Many ceramic artists acknowledged their debt to Alice Hagen as a teacher and an example.

China painting, or porcelain painting, is the decoration of glazed porcelain objects such as plates, bowls, vases or statues. The body of the object may be hard-paste porcelain, developed in China in the 7th or 8th century, or soft-paste porcelain, developed in 18th-century Europe. The broader term ceramic painting includes painted decoration on lead-glazed earthenware such as creamware or tin-glazed pottery such as maiolica or faience.