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4  women artists, collectors and patrons WOMEN ARTISTS, COLLECTORS AND PATRONS 1 CHRISTOPHER ROWELL looks at the pioneering figures who have shaped National Trust houses in so many different ways, and whose legacy can still be felt today This is the 25th National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual, published in association with Apollo, but the first to be dedicated to a specific topic, reflecting the National Trust’s theme for 2018, ‘Women and Power’.1 Women have enhanced National Trust houses in a multiplicity of ways.2 Last year’s edition, on the subject of Mount Stewart, County Down, devoted much attention to its chatelaines, among them Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, who not only redecorated the house between the wars but also designed its idiosyncratic garden. Women have shaped numerous other National Trust houses. For instance, Lady Londonderry’s younger contemporary Teresa Hulton, the half-Italian daughter of a painter, played an important part in reviving Attingham Park, Shropshire, the ancestral home of her husband, Thomas Noel-Hill, eighth Lord Berwick, and its extensive Italian collection. Among her numerous guests at Attingham was the American artist and socialite Ethel Sands, whose painting The Boudoir at Attingham Park, completed during her stay there in 1929, was acquired at auction by the National Trust in 2013 (Fig. 2).3 Sands (who in 1896 trained with her partner, Nan Hudson, at Eugène Carrière’s Paris studio) was devoted to her beloved ‘Aunt Alice’, Alice de Rothschild, chatelaine of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. Alice ‘intervened more than once’ when Sands’ lesbian relationships ‘seemed likely to cause public scandal’.4 Sands was also a disciple of Lady
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women artists, collectors and patrons  5 FIG 1 Self-portrait of the Artist Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), oil on canvas, 147 x 215cm, Nostell Priory, Yorkshire Photo: © National Trust Images

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4  women artists, collectors and patrons

WOMEN ARTISTS, COLLECTORS AND PATRONS

1

CHRISTOPHER ROWELL looks at the pioneering figures who have shaped National Trust houses in so many different ways, and whose legacy can still be felt today

This is the 25th National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual, published in association with Apollo, but the first to be dedicated to a specific topic, reflecting the National Trust’s theme for 2018, ‘Women and Power’.1 Women have enhanced National Trust houses in a multiplicity of ways.2 Last year’s edition, on the subject of Mount Stewart, County Down, devoted much attention to its chatelaines, among them Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, who not only redecorated the house between the wars but also designed its idiosyncratic garden.

Women have shaped numerous other National Trust houses. For instance, Lady Londonderry’s younger contemporary Teresa Hulton, the half-Italian daughter of a painter, played an important part in reviving Attingham Park, Shropshire, the ancestral home of her husband, Thomas Noel-Hill, eighth Lord Berwick, and its extensive Italian collection. Among her numerous guests at Attingham was the American artist and socialite Ethel Sands, whose painting The Boudoir at Attingham Park, completed during her stay there in 1929, was acquired at auction by the National Trust in 2013 (Fig. 2).3 Sands (who in 1896 trained with her partner, Nan Hudson, at Eugène Carrière’s Paris studio) was devoted to her beloved ‘Aunt Alice’, Alice de Rothschild, chatelaine of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire. Alice ‘intervened more than once’ when Sands’ lesbian relationships ‘seemed likely to cause public scandal’.4 Sands was also a disciple of Lady

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