Like Lady Sibyl Colefax and Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sands entertained artists and writers with the intention to nurture and discuss ideas relevant to their careers.
Affiliated with the Bloomsbury Group, she was most well known as "one of the leading artist hostesses of her time," her lavish affairs were financially possible due to the significant wealth she inherited from her parents.
She was mainly at the Oxford, Newington house until 1920, but when in England she also entertained at her London Lowndes Street house, and between 1913 and 1937 at 15 Vale, Chelsea, London house, where she lived near her mother's friend, Henry James.
Notable artists Augustus John and Walter Sickert.
 Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Arnold Bennett were among the writers of the "cultural elite" who visited her.
Her friends included artist Jacques-Émile Blanche, writer Edith Wharton, poet William Butler Yeats, essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith and novelist Howard Overing Sturgis.

Lytton Strachey (a founder of the Bloomsbury Group} met at Sands' house and her uncle, Edwin Lawrence Godkin wrote of his upcoming visit to Sands' house in Oxfordshire, "There one fortnight, and then back to "holy wars," patriotism, and buncombe..."
She was a patron and collector of works by other contemporary artists.
For instance, she commissioned Boris Anrep, a Russian immigrant, to create mosaics and murals in her Vale, Chelsea house.
Sands continued to entertain into the 1950s with her friends, including Duncan Grant and Desmond MacCarthy, until he died in 1952.

She was described as a "plain woman of immense charm, cultivation and perception, and a painter of considerable talent" in the Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction.
It was suggested there that Henry James modelled the character Nanda in The Awkward Age after Sands.
Like Lady Sibyl Colefax and Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sands entertained artists and writers with the intention to nurture and discuss ideas relevant to their careers. Affiliated with the Bloomsbury Group, she was most well known as "one of the leading artist hostesses of her time," her lavish affairs were financially possible due to the significant wealth she inherited from her parents. She was mainly at the Oxford, Newington house until 1920, but when in England she also entertained at her London Lowndes Street house, and between 1913 and 1937 at 15 Vale, Chelsea, London house, where she lived near her mother's friend, Henry James. Notable artists Augustus John and Walter Sickert.  Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and Arnold Bennett were among the writers of the "cultural elite" who visited her. Her friends included artist Jacques-Émile Blanche, writer Edith Wharton, poet William Butler Yeats, essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith and novelist Howard Overing Sturgis.
Lytton Strachey (a founder of the Bloomsbury Group} met at Sands' house and her uncle, Edwin Lawrence Godkin wrote of his upcoming visit to Sands' house in Oxfordshire, "There one fortnight, and then back to "holy wars," patriotism, and buncombe..."
She was a patron and collector of works by other contemporary artists. For instance, she commissioned Boris Anrep, a Russian immigrant, to create mosaics and murals in her Vale, Chelsea house. Sands continued to entertain into the 1950s with her friends, including Duncan Grant and Desmond MacCarthy, until he died in 1952.
She was described as a "plain woman of immense charm, cultivation and perception, and a painter of considerable talent" in the Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction. It was suggested there that Henry James modelled the character Nanda in The Awkward Age after Sands.
Ethel Sands