26 Facts About Ethel Sands

Ethel Sands was an American-born artist and hostess who lived in England from childhood.

Ethel Sands studied art in Paris, where she met her life partner Anna Hope Hudson.

Ethel Sands's works were generally still lifes and interiors, often of Chateau d'Auppegard that she shared with Hudson.

Ethel Sands's works are in London's National Portrait Gallery and other public collections.

Ethel Sands was born on 6 July 1873 in Newport, Rhode Island, the first child of Mary Morton and Mahlon Day Sands, who married in 1872.

Mahlon Ethel Sands was secretary of the American Free Trade League, who in 1870 advocated for civil service reform and free trade.

The wealthy Ethel Sands circulated among London society, including writer and statesman John Morley, politician William Ewart Gladstone, writer Henry James, artist John Singer Sargent, the Rothschild family, and Henry Graham White.

Ethel Sands was raised in a respectable upper-class household in which her parents were "happily married".

Ethel Sands's father had ridden horseback through Hyde Park, was thrown from the horse and died an accidental death in 1888.

Ethel Sands was one of the artists that founded the London Group.

Hudson and Ethel Sands had a show at Carfax Gallery in 1912.

Ethel Sands's works were exhibited at Goupil Gallery, and in 1922 she had her initial solo show.

Ethel Sands exhibited often at the Women's International Art Club and the New English Art Club.

Ethel Sands's works are in the collections of Tate museum Government Art Collection, and Fitzwilliam Museum.

Ethel Sands was mainly at the Oxford, Newington house until 1920, but when in England she entertained at her London Lowndes Street house, and between 1913 and 1937 at 15 Vale, Chelsea, London house, where she lived near her mother's friend, Henry James.

Ethel Sands's friends included artist Jacques-Emile Blanche, writer Edith Wharton, poet William Butler Yeats, essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith and novelist Howard Overing Sturgis.

Ethel Sands was a patron and collector of works by other contemporary artists.

Ethel Sands continued to entertain into the 1950s with her friends, including Duncan Grant and Desmond MacCarthy, until he died in 1952.

Ethel Sands was described as a "plain woman of immense charm, cultivation and perception, and a painter of considerable talent" in the Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction.

Ethel Sands tended to soldiers who had been injured in France during World War I, having established a hospital for soldiers near Dieppe with Hudson.

Ethel Sands was then in Britain working as a forewoman in a factory that made overalls.

Ethel Sands's mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets.

Hudson enjoyed living a relatively quiet life in France and Ethel Sands liked the London and Oxford social life.

Ethel Sands entertained people within and outside of the cultural elite throughout her life.

When Hudson's health began to fail, Ethel Sands nursed her until she died in 1957.

Wendy Baron, an author and art historian, wrote a biography about Ethel Sands, partly based upon the letters that Ethel Sands exchanged with Hudson and others.