Ethel Sands
(1873 - 1962) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Ethel Sands |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Newport, Rhode Island |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1873 |
| Death: |
1962 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
In her book Miss Ethel Sands and her Circle (London 1977), Wendy Baron described the life and work of this painter of interiors, figures, flowers and still life. Sands was born in America, and her wealthy family moved to England while she was a child. She trained at Eugene Carriere's Parisian atelier, and lived in France and England.
Sands is known for her association with Walter Sickert. Although she was invited to join his Fitzroy Street Group, she and other women were excluded from the Camden Town Group. This exclusion has been reflected in critical perception of her work as a pretty copy of Camden Town painting, overlooking Sands's significance. Responding to her first solo exhibition (in Paris in 1911) a critic wrote: 'Vuillard has not done better in this respect. Miss Ethel Sands is an intimiste of the most subtle kind.' In 1912 a joint show was held at the Carfax Gallery with her life-long partner. Nan (Anna Hope) Hudson, and a solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1922 was reviewed in most of the national newspapers. She also showed with the Allied Artists Association and was a founder member of the London Group. In Sands's work, interior spaces are painted in subtle color. Rather than picturing Sickert's gloomy poverty, she painted exquisitely arranged interiors, often at the homes she created with Hudson. Hudson's painting of their house, the Chateau d'Auppegard, has recently been given to the Tate Collection.
A brief history of the critical reception of Sands's painting now known as Tea with Sickert (c.1912) reveals the politics of interpretation at work. Sands titled the painting A Tea Table and exhibited it at her 1912 Carfax show. The Westminster Gazette admired it as a 'daring picture', but the influential critic Roger Fry, writing in the Nation, dismissed the whole exhibition as 'frankly feminine'. By 1988 Sands's Ethel Sands painting had been re-titled to include the name of the famous male painter, making it marketable at a Christie's auction. But the picture portrays two people, a man and a woman, and despite the new title identifying the male figure as an important artist, the female figure dominates. The viewer's perspective echoes her sightline, sweeping across the table and up into the comer, into which the small male figure is pushed. |
Samples of Work
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