Who Was Ethel Sands and Why Was She So Important?

The room comes into focus slowly. It’s an intimate space, with clothing strewn across a chair and a glimpse of a bed frame on the left side of the canvas. Seen through an open door is a smaller room. Warmed by sunlight, it invites us in, but it doesn’t offer us the detail that would make it truly legible.

A Dressing Room was painted by Ethel Sands in the early 20th century, probably between 1910 and 1920. Sands was painting the innermost space of a bedroom she shared with her life partner, Anna “Nan” Hope Hudson. It’s tempting to read it as the metaphorical closet that Sands and Hudson hovered on the threshold of throughout their long relationship. The two women never openly called themselves lesbian, homosexual, or even “sapphic” (the term of choice among upper-class women in Britain at the time)—at least not in any surviving record. Sands was a close friend of Virginia Woolf and well acquainted with many artists and other creative personalities who lived their queer identities much more openly, but she and Hudson chose not to.

As an artist, Sands made beautiful and distinctive paintings that engaged with many of the key aesthetic questions at stake in the development of modernism. The concept of “the modern” is constructed in contrast to the past, but Sands ebbs comfortably among the artistic tides of previous eras in a way that unsettles the usual understanding of modernity as a hard rupture with everything that came before it. In her art, as in her personal life, she looked backward as much as she looked forward, expanding the way modernism cam be understood.

Sands was born in America in 1873 but brought up in England by parents who were close friends of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). She existed in a cosmopolitan elite throughout her life. When she was a teenager, her parents died suddenly, one after the other, leaving her a significant inheritance. That she chose to use this privilege to pursue a career as an artist and establish a home with her lesbian partner is remarkably modern. But her peers perceived her as very old-fashioned. Her paintings and home decorating taste were said to have something of the 18th century about them in their “fatal prettiness,” to use Vanessa Bell’s description. Her choice to live “respectably,” including not flaunting her queer identity in the manner of characters like Gertrude Stein or Romaine Brooks, has been read by both friends and 21st-century critics as either a sign of fundamental boringness or the result of homophobic oppression.

The wider modernist movement is defined by the drive to innovate, shock, and challenge. Its story has traditionally been told through the development of abstraction from Impressionism to the Abstract Expressionists, following a series of now-iconic male artists through -ism after -ism. But Sands, who grappled with many of the same visual questions as her peers in the two most prominent avant-garde groups with which she was associated—the Camden Town Group and the Bloomsbury Group—had a different ethos. Like her male peers, she painted modern life, but modern life for her was defined by financial, social, and domestic independence. As a wealthy heiress, she was able to construct a life exactly as she wished. She reveled in decorating her homes to her taste, living and socializing where she wished, and making art. She was also a prolific hostess, a role that overshadowed her career as an artist, and one that has traditionally fallen on wealthy women. Her friend Leslie Hartley remembered being “dazzled by the social glitter” of Sands’s life. Her friendships defined her, energized her, challenged her.

Although her home was usually packed with guests, Sands’s paintings are more often empty. Works like The Chintz Couch, which depicts her home in London, or Open Door, showing a room in the chateau she and Hudson bought in northern France, share the cheerful palette yet eerie emptiness of A Dressing Room. One exception is Tea with Sickert, which shows us the artist Walter Sickert and a female guest in a wonderfully big hat. Sickert was a close friend of Sands and Hudson and was the founder of the Camden Town Group, which excluded women. (Also a raging misogynist, he never took Sands particularly seriously as an artist and relied on her to play hostess when he needed it.)

A Times review of Sands’s solo exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1922 remarked that “you can see, here and there, traces of the visionary squalor of Mr. Walter Sickert, but with her it has lost its irony, its slovenliness, and has become healthy, sunlit, and happy.” To Sickert that would have been an insult; his modernism was defined by slovenliness. But the review points to the very way in which Sands expands what modernism, and modernity, can be. Her painterly brushwork, which is deeply concerned with the materiality of oil paint, her fascination with light and color, her interest in the French post-Impressionists like Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and her exploration of disjointed space all engage with the major aesthetic currents of modernism. She is not confined by the Baudelairean flaneur model of the modern artist. Instead, she invents a new way of representing modernity that is equally striking.

Sands was a magnetic figure: Her personal charm radiates across time even now through the memories of her many, many friends. Her paintings are both gorgeous and unsettling. There is a fundamental sense of enigma or opacity about Sands that is fascinating but has also contributed to her sidelining in the history of art. The paradoxes she embodies—innovative but old-fashioned, radical but respectable, rich but ambitious, extroverted but guarded—make her a nexus of the contradictions and dynamism of modernity.

Read more of our Women’s History Month coverage here.