14 MAY 1977, Page 21

A light touch

Richard Shone

Miss Ethel Sands and Her Circle Wendy Baron (Peter Owen £8.50)

It was often supposed that Henry James took certain characteristics from the young Ethel Sands when he drew the portrait of Nanda Brookenham in The Awkward Age. Certainly some qualities common to both are discernible and Ethel's parents moved HI a circle of friends as worldly as that around Mrs Brookenham though not, as far as one can gather, capable of such delicate corruption. The early chapters of Wendy Baron's book call to mind the Jamesian International subject' with all its tea-table tensions and Atlantic crossings 7 the i American penetration of London society n the 'seventies and 'eighties. The Sands were among its most distinguished invaders. They were a rich, well-educated and goodlooking couple, Mahlon and Mary Sands, With a house on Fifth Avenue and another in Newport, Rhode Island where Ethel was born in 1873. In England, particularly among the Marlborough House set, Mrs Sands was commonly regarded as one of the loveliest women of the day. In another age, Mrs Sands might not have appeared as stupendous as she did to the late Victorians; certainly there could be no fashions in ugliness which would have excluded her daughter> Ethel, whose arrant plainness conditioned her, as Wendy Baron writes, `to the expectation of a celibate life.' Obviously Nanda Brookenham's Gainsborough charms — of which no one of course is entirely sure for many pages — do not derive from Ethel. To those who knew her, she was n°t ugly at all; she gained immeasurably in Presence by her graceful figure, distinctive clothes and vivid eyes. ho was she and why has someone rrtten a book about this plain American t,roln the beau monde? She was a painter, nos tess and friend of several generations of writers and painters. Her houses in London, at Newington near Oxford and at the Chateau d'Auppegard near Dieppe saw memorable gatherings and meetings; she wa§ also a discerning collector of pictures. At various times she commissioned decorations for her homes from Boris A nrep, from Sicken, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. _After her death, an enormous collection of letters and papers remained intact with her IarmlY. Dr Baron came across it when she Was writing her splendid book on Sickert — letters from Henry James and the Prince of _ .ale.s .to Mrs Sands, from George Moore, _Virginia Woolf, Pearsall Smith and L. P. Hartley to her daughter and it is this corresPondence which forms the fabric of the book.

In choosing this method — narrative propelled by quotation — Dr Baron imposes limits on herself and, though occasionally one would have wished for more detail, the form is justified for a life which was in essentials undramatic, equable and given over to painting, conversation and travel. There was only one love affair, if it can be called that, for Ethel Sands lived for sixty years with another American painter Nan Hudson whom she met in Paris in 1894 when they were both students. Though Wendy Baron cautions us against thinking it a physical lesbian relationship, it was certainly the most consuming and devoted friendship.

Ethel was more immediately social, worldly and charming; Nan was often silent and solitary and according to some the more remarkable person and probably the better painter — certainly Sickert thought so. It was Sickert's devotion to Nan Hudson and his admiration for her work (an admiration extended to Ethel's though not quite so warmly) which gave the two women a position among the Fitzroy Street Group of painters with its Saturday meetings in a rented studio. Here work could be shown, discussed by fellow-practitioners and seen by possible patrons. Sickert was master of ceremonies, and Gore, Gilman, Pisarro among the regulars. Dr Baron is in her element. That scrupulous accumulation of facts and their illuminating interconnections , which characterised her work on Sickert are here re-presented with precision and lightness of touch. It is in these chapters that the . and Her Circle' of the title comes into its own. Her evocation of Sickert at this period brings us closer to him in a few pages than the whole of Denys Sutton's recent biography. His letters to Nan Hudson in particular abound in technical advice and snappy aphorisms especially at the expense of the aesthete — 'le plus gros mot que je connaisse.' Though Nan was to paint mainly landscape and Ethel's most characteristic works were of elegant interiors, all chintz and chatter of colour, they were prepared at this time to sniff into Sickert's territory. 'It is astonishing,' he wrote to Nan Hudson, 'what one common little lodging room and one little drab. . . contain of beauty for us, you and me, and others who understand. Aesthetes and people of taste, oddly enough, have no natural sense of beauty at all. All words and labels.' The two women exhibited widely, were members of the London Group and showed at the Paris Salon. Unfortunately much of their work was destroyed in the war — few by Nan Hudson now remain — but Wendy Baron does emphasise the impor

tance of painting in their lives and shows that unlike many of Sickert's 'pupils', they were not simply lady-dabblers. A collection of their work and some by their friends is currently on exhibition at the Fine Art Society, Bond Street.

In later years however, the drawing room displaced the studio and though Nan continued to paint, often going off alone to Aix, .Ethel's activities were concentrated on entertaining her friends — new ones such as L.P. Hartley, Raymond Mortimer and Elizabeth Bowen, often introducing them to an older generation. Her advice was often sought after and the affection in which she was held is conveyed by the judiciously chosen and frequently amusing quotations from letters. Inevitably Virginia Woolf's take the prize — rambling, effervescent, teasing, recognising those qualities in Ethel which made her sympathetic to the rough and tumble of Bloomsbury and those of refined worldliness which made Vanessa Bell on a visit to the Château d'Auppegard long 'for a breath from one's home dirt.'

Wendy Baron has compiled a useful and entertaining book putting up lights here and there in the alcoves and recesses of a period that has few dark corners left. For this alone one is grateful. If only the illustrations had been better and more plentiful.