Walter Richard Sickert, Ethel Sands Descending the Staircase at Newington, c.1920Walter Sickerts Ethel Sands Descending a Staircase at Newington (1920) offers a glimpse into the life of Ethel Sands, a well known painter, hostess and socialite of the 20th century who gathered artists and writers such as Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and Virginia Woolf in her home in Newington in Oxfordshire. While studying painting in Paris during 1897, Sands met fellow painter Anna Nan Hope Hudson with whom she then developed a long term romantic