Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Ethel Sands artist

Ethel Sands was born to a wealthy family in Newport, Rhode Island, USA in 1873. After first visiting England in 1874, her family decided to take up permanent residence, having established notable contacts in London. Sands studied in the Academie Carriere in France, where she met her her life partner, the artist Anna Hudson. In 1907 Walter Sickert invited Sands to become a member of, and exhibit with, the progressive Fitzroy Street Group. Sickert and Sands subsequently became two of the co-founders of The London Group. Sands was particularly known for her elegant, intimate domestic interiors and still lifes, inspired by the work of Edouard Vuillard.

Born: 1873 Newport, Rhode Island, USA

Died: 1962 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1874


Biography

Artist Ethel Sands was born into a wealthy family in Newport, Rhode Island, USA in 1873. She was related on her father’s side to one of the old mercantile families of New York who traced their ancestry back to England. After visiting England in 1874, her family decided to take up permanent residence, having established notable contacts in London, including Henry James, John Singer Sargent and the Prince of Wales. Sargent, who painted a portrait of Sands’ mother, encouraged Sands to study painting in Paris. She subsequently enrolled in the Academie Carriere in 1894, where she studied for several years and also met her life partner, the artist Anna Hudson. Sands was particularly known for her elegant, intimate domestic interiors and still lifes inspired by the work of Edouard Vuillard. She also painted numerous portraits (among her sitters were Clive Bell, Raymond Mortimer, and Logan Pearsall Smith), as well as decorative screens and pieces of furniture. She exhibited for the first time at the 1904 Salon d’Automne in Paris.

In 1907 Walter Sickert invited Sands to become a member of, and to exhibit with, the Fitzroy Street Group in London. Sickert and Sands went on to co-found the progressive exhibiting society, The London Group in 1913. Sands had her first solo exhibition in 1911 in Paris, then exhibited paintings, together with Hudson, at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1912. In the same year, she exhibited at the Goupil Gallery. Roger Fry wrote in the New Statesman that he found her paintings ‘so charming, so complete in what they attempt, so tasteful, delicate and also so personal, that I feel the critic has no business to interfere. […] Her work […] is at all events charmingly domestic. She is forever on the watch for the odd and unexpected felicities of vision in daily life’ (Fry 1922, p. 561). Both Sands and Hudson were frequent contributors to shows by the Women’s International Art Club and the New English Art Club (NEAC).

In 1916 Sands obtained British citizenship and both women purchased properties in London and Oxford. Sands became well-known for her salon-style gatherings of artists and writers in Bloomsbury and in the country. Noted attendees included Virginia Woolf, Augustus John, Edith Wharton, Walter Sickert, and Henry James. She also supported her contemporaries and at various times purchased their works (including from Augustus John and Sickert) and commissioned decorations for her homes from Boris Anrep, Sickert, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Sands and Hudson were extremely hospitable and often entertained friends at the Château d’Auppegard at Offranville, near Dieppe, France, leased for the summer in 1920 and later purchased by Hudson. Many members of the Bloomsbury group visited the artists there, particularly between 1920 and 1929, among them Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and Ottoline and Philip Morrell. During the First and Second World War, Sands worked as a nurse in France and England. Her Chelsea house was destroyed during the Blitz, resulting in the loss of most of her and Hudson’s work.

Ethel Sands died at her home in London England on 19 March 1962. Her work is represented in UK public collections including the Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and Tate. Posthumously, her work has featured in a number of exhibitions, including Ben Uri's 2013 anniversary survey, Uproar!: The First 50 Years of The London Group.

Related books

  • 'Uproar!: The First 50 Years of The London Group', Sarah MacDougall & Rachel Dickson, eds., (London: Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art and Lund Humphries, 2013)
  • Laura Feigel and Alexandra Harris, Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 62-63, 250, 251
  • Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists (London: Tate Publishing, 2004) p. 161
  • Simon Watney, ‘The Murals at the Château d’Auppegard’, Charleston Magazine, No. 23 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 31-37
  • Mary Ann Caws, Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
  • Wendy Baron, Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
  • Denys J Wilcox, The London Group, 1913-1939: The Artists and their Works (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995)
  • Sarah Bradford and Honor Clerk, The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s (University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 45, 64, 68, 204
  • Wendy Baron and Francis Farmar eds., The Painters of Camden Town, 1905–1920 (London: Christie’s, 1988)
  • Wendy Baron, Miss Ethel Sands and her Circle (London: Peter Owen, 1977)
  • Paul Levy, ‘The Elusive Ethel’, The Observer, 8 May 1977, p. 27
  • Wendy Baron, Camden Town Recalled (London: Fine Art Society, 1976)
  • P.G. Konody, ‘Art and Artists’, The Observer, 13 April 1924, p. 10
  • Roger Fry, ‘The Goupil Gallery’, New Statesman, Vol. 18, 18 February 1922, p. 561
  • ‘Art & Artists: The London Group’, The Observer, 29 April 1917, p. 5
  • ‘Carfax Gallery’, The Atheneum, 15 June 1912, p. 686
  • ‘Art & Artists: The London Salon’, The Observer, 9 July 1911, p. 4

Related organisations

  • Académie Carrière (student)
  • Bloomsbury Group (associated with)
  • London Group (co-founder and member)
  • New English Art Club (exhibitor)
  • Women’s International Art Club (exhibitor)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • 'Uproar!: The First 50 Years of The London Group', Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art (2013-14)
  • The Painters of Camden Town, 1905–1920, Christie's, London (1988)
  • Miss Ethel Sands and her Circle, Fine Art Society, London (1977)
  • Camden Town Recalled, Fine Art Society, London (1976)
  • solo exhibition, Goupil Gallery, London (1922)
  • English Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others, Brighton (1913)
  • Ethel Sands and Anna Hope Hudson, Carfax Gallery, London (1912)
  • Contemporary Art Society, London (1911)
  • Allied Artists’ Association (1911)
  • Interiors by Ethel Sands, Modern Gallery (1907)
  Ethel Sands
   
Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ethel Sands]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Ethel Sands] in the Ben Uri Library