Ethel Sands: Queer Iridescence at Auppegard.
By Imogen Lee
Observing the difficulty of classifying historical LGBTQ+ individuals given changing conceptions of gender and sexuality and absences of conclusive evidence in the archive, Joshua Adair describes ‘glimpses’ of non-normative lives through Elisa Giaccardi’s notion of iridescence. While the challenges of telling LGBTQ+ history can lead to a reinforcement of the historical erasure of sexually dissident people, Adair argues it is important to examine “moments when an object or subject iridesces,” attentive to multiple possibilities and positionalities involved, or “the ways in which [past lives] shimmer, diffract.” I am reminded of this notion of queer iridescence looking at Ethel Sands’ Interior With Mirror and Fireplace (fig. 1).
Figure 1: Ethel Sands, Interior with Mirror and Fireplace, c.1920s, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 53cm. Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Image accessed via Art UK Website.
The dappled, shimmering surface of the large mirror at the centre of the composition is rendered with small vertical brushstrokes, conveying flickering silvery light. The furniture of the composition -- a circular table, littered with books; an extravagant bouquet of red, orange, and pink flowers; an empty chair – are all partially cropped and arranged to create a sense of space and depth, drawing the eye towards the mirror. Within the mirror, reflections of mantelpiece ornaments and candles are discernible, in addition to a white panelled wall opposite. However, it is largely an absent plane, subverting the conventional use of mirrors in the artistic tradition as revelatory devices. As Rebecca Birrell suggests, Sands’ refusal to ‘disclose’ is a distinctly queer evasion. Therefore, rather than emptiness, the mirror becomes a site of possibility, historical as well as material ‘iridescence.’
Consistent with the long-identified trope of romantic relationships between women being misconstrued as merely friendship or platonic companionship, Ethel Sands and Anna ‘Nan’ Hudson’s relationship has been subject to misleading descriptions of cohabiting spinsterhood. After meeting in Paris when studying painting under Carrière, Ethel and Nan formed an enduring and devoted relationship. Born in 1873 to affluent aristocrats Mahlon Sands and Mary Morton Hartpence, Sands had access to the connections, status and resources essential for pursuing art, and this vast inherited wealth allowed them both to live without the need of husbands to finance them. Splitting their time between homes in London and France, thousands of extant letters between them attest to this constant, loving bond. Their inclusion in Tate’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 exhibition (2017) affirmed the now widely acknowledged queer nature of their relationship.
Figure 2: Ethel Sands, Nan Hudson Playing Patience at Auppegard, France, date unknown, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 52cm. Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Image accessed at Art UK Website.
During Sands’ life, the idea of ‘Lesbianism’ as we use the term today was in the process of entering public discourse. Although male homosexuality had long been criminalised, female homosexuality was regarded differently, with its nature and even existence still contentious. For example, in 1921 Parliament refused to create a specific offence due to fear that women same-sex relationships might spread if they became known to exist. However, instances of when this condition of invisibility slipped illustrate the social violence against women who challenged the heteronormative order. The famous cases of Maud Allen (1918) and Radclyffe Hall (1928) capture the notoriety, scandal and anxiety associated with Lesbianism. Whilst Sands was friends with fellow creatives such as Virginia Woolf (now understood to be an important LGBTQ+ figure), it seems the artist distanced herself from openly gay circles. Likewise, her works do not explicitly reveal their relationship. Nonetheless, even as a “hostess of genius” who faithfully conformed to expectations of upper-class femininity in many respects, Sands’ decision to create a life with Nan was completely transgressive. Looking at these artworks queerly we can perceive necessary acts of concealment and find queer possibility within them, in the context of romantic love between women being sensationalised and stigmatised.
Ethel Sands’ surviving oeuvre consists almost exclusively of domestic interior scenes, contributing to a long tradition from 17th century genre scenes to the more immediately preceding Impressionists. While Sands’ friend and mentor Walter Sickert also painted interiors (among other subjects), he derided her representations of the bourgeoisie living room, suggesting that the scullery was a more compelling site of modernity. Similarly, contemporary critics described Sands’ work condescendingly, imploring her “to put her remarkable brush-power, her gift as a colourist, to higher uses; that she [would be] able to enlarge the scope and the significance of her art generally.” This understanding of her work as merely ‘pretty’ objects - simple and essentially unambitious - has been reiterated across historical accounts and reflects patriarchal value systems. By contrast, feminist art historians have emphasised the expressive importance of domestic interiors in the oeuvres of women artists; as Griselda Pollock argues, the representation of interiors was bound up in social constraints and expectations of femininity. Sands’ well-appointed rooms are evidently structured by not only gender, but also class; they illustrate a specific viewpoint, distant from the experiences of most women and sexually dissident people in the early 20th Century. Although Sands’ choice of subject is informed by these social factors and both gender and class would likely be revealing lenses, as Michael Haat argues, “interiors are often under-read” especially in terms of their “personal investment.” This is what I discuss here.
Figure 3: Ethel Sands, Double Doors, Oil on Canvas, date unknown, 53 x 45cm. Guildhall Art Gallery. Image accessed via Art UK Website.
In particular, Sands’ representations of Chateau d’Auppegard in France - the home she bought in 1921 and renovated with Hudson - can be read as intimate locales of queer possibility. Taken together, the Auppegard series conveys a sense of inhabitation and temporality. Their dappled luminosity, changing of light, and the recognisability of repeated elements - the striped chair, a favourite jug - suggest the lived in nature of the scenes, with objects having been moved or rearranged by the scene’s implicit inhabitants, as time passes. Predominantly absent of figures (with exceptions like Nan Hudson Playing Patience at Auppegard, France (fig. 2)), these paintings nonetheless conjure traces of people. In Double Doors (fig. 3), behind pale pink panelled doors, a patterned, blue-walled room gives way to yet another room, within which someone sits with their backs turned; this act of drawing the viewer in only to turn away and obstruct, or to refrain from divulging any detail echoes the silvery mirror above the fireplace. Similarly, in Bedroom Interior (fig. 4), Sands positions us within an intimate space, yet the bed is empty: against a wall bedecked with frames, whose ambiguous contents cannot be made out. This “play with outside and inside, frame and contents, the explicit and the implicit” is key to understandings of queer artmaking. In addition to acts of concealment, the silhouette of the figure in the background and the blanket spilling over the edge of the bed simultaneously serve to animate the spaces in which they lived and spent their summers. The house “became a stopping off point for the Bloomsbury group,” with Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry often visiting on their way to or from Paris, and in these works, Sands might gesture towards these comings and goings.
Figure 4: Ethel Sands, Bedroom Interior, Oil on Canvas, date unknown, 60 x 48. Guildhall Art Gallery, London. Image accessed via Art UK Website.
Moreover, the decorative and painterly details of the Auppegard paintings, which resulted in their premature dismissal, serve to convey Sands and Hudson’s devoted homemaking efforts. The delicate, feathery brushstrokes depicting the wallpaper pattern in Double Doors both reflects their elegant, stylish design choices and re-enacts the painting of the walls of the physical house. In Wendy Baron’s biography of Sands, she describes Auppegard’s “fragile and fairytale aspect” in detail, noting that Ethel painted elements throughout, including trompe l’oeil shelves on the bathroom walls. They undertook extensive renovations with “meticulous attention to detail,” creating a personal and idiosyncratic home. In Bedroom Interior, furnishings like the bed cover, blue chair and rug contribute to a comfortable, relaxed atmosphere. The impressionistic rendering of the rug with small patches of paint is tactile, appearing soft and cushioned. As Baron highlights, Nan “spent endless hours embroidering her linens, making passe-partout frames for drawings, designing and executing needlework cushion covers, and generally embellishing her home.” The prettiness and homeliness of Sands’ representations therein directly reflect Nan’s dedicated labour in adorning their life together. Thus Ethel’s “personal investment” is clear in these paintings, creating painterly monuments to the home they shared together, to Nan’s love, and to summers spent together.
Whether or not Sands identified as a lesbian, she resisted the demands of heteronormative society to craft an essentially queer life with Nan. These paintings of Auppegard represent an instance where a subject ‘iridesces.’ More than elegant empty rooms, the tactile details, absences, and layered sense of temporality express some of the romance and possibility embodied in the deeply personal and loved site of Auppegard.
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