Ethel Mars, 1876 – 1959

Research and Text by Jacqueline Yu, B.A. in Art History and East Asian Languages and Culture, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2024. Columbia Global Virtual Intern, 2023 – 2024.

Ethel Mars. 20th century. National Gallery of Art Library.

Ethel Mars was born in 1876 in Springfield, Illinois. She was the only child of a clerk of the Wabash Railroad Company and a housewife. The details of her childhood remain largely unknown, although it may be assumed that her family had relatively limited means. In 1893, she was forced to drop out of the Cincinnati Art Academy (CAA) due to financial difficulties and was only able to re-enroll the following year because she received a scholarship.

For the next four years, Mars flourished at the CAA. She developed her talents in drawing, painting, and printmaking under the tutelage of famed artists Frank Duveneck and Lewis Henry Meakin. Even as a student, she received recognition for her work, exhibiting in numerous shows alongside her more established teachers. Beyond finding professional success, Mars also developed a number of influential personal relationships. For example, classmates Edna Boies Hopkins and her husband James Hopkins would go on to become Mars’ lifelong friends and collaborators. Mars’ encounter with Maud Hunt Squire would prove the most consequential.

From their fateful meeting at the academy around 1895 to Squire’s death in 1954, Mars and Squire were inseparable. Their partnership is often labeled a “Boston marriage,” a term “typically deployed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe relationships between White middle-class women who formed deeply connected partnerships and never married” (Langa 126). The exact nature of Mars and Squire’s relationships is heavily debated by scholars today. On one hand, historian Catherine Ryan argues that it is unclear if the artists were lesbians and that it is much more likely that they had an evolving relationship. According to Dorothy Squire, Maud’s niece, Mars took on many lovers throughout her life whilst Squire was too preoccupied with her work (Ryan 6). 

On the other hand, Mars and Squire were the inspiration for a famous piece of early queer  literature. Written sometime between 1909 and 1911 but not published until 1922, Gertrude Stein’s prose poem, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene: The Tale of Two Young Ladies Who Were Gay Together and of How One Left the Other Behind” details the “gay” relationship between two women who build a life together and then steadily grow apart. An excerpt from the poem reads: “They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there, they were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there” (Stein). In the 1990s, Professor Linda Wagner-Martin stated that the constant repetition of “gay” in “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” marks one of the first times that term is used with a sexual connotation in English literary history (Stone 29). Despite the narrative of the poem not perfectly aligning with Mars and Squire’s reality, both Stein and the printmakers themselves confirmed that they were the real-life counterparts to Furr and Skeene. Regardless of the exact nature of their relationship, Mars and Squire remained companions for almost 60 years. 

After their graduation in 1898, the women briefly moved in with Mars’ family in Springfield before traveling to Chicago in 1899. Mars exhibited across the midwest, participating in annual shows at the Society of Western Artists, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work was occasionally met with critical acclaim; one reflection published in the Chicago Daily Tribune described her “figures and heads of young women” as “unusually pleasing” (“ART” 27).

Ethel Mars (right) and Maud Squire (left)

In 1900, the pair again decided to relocate, moving to New York City to pursue work in book illustration with publisher R.H. Russell. Mars’ illustrations were included in A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb, and Children of Our Town by Carolyn Wells. Alongside her commercial work, Mars submitted pieces to exhibitions. She showed with the American Art Association Galleries, the National Academy of Design, and the Society of American Artists in New York, as well as the Dallas School of Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Mars and Squire’s artistic achievements were celebrated by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1903 with a special joint exhibition featuring more than 200 illustrations by the pair. From 1904 to 1905, they lived in Cincinnati, then in Illinois, and finally returned to New York City. During this period, Mars unsuccessfully attempted to secure teaching positions at the Cincinnati Art Academy and other institutions. Some time between September 1905 and 1906, the women moved to France.

In Paris, they frequented the Girls’ Art Club and participated in its cultural programming; gallerist Janet Altic Flint referred to these activities as “wholesome” (Stone 29). Within a year of moving to Paris, Mars and Squire had fully embraced the avant-garde, bohemian lifestyle. Art critic James Mellow described their transformation in a 1973 article: “two minor painters who frequented the rue de Fleurus… two Midwesterners with cultural ambitions – they both dabbled in watercolors – who had arrived in Paris, early in the century, somewhat mousy, tailored and prim. Within a year they were habitués of the local cafes, Miss Mars had dyed her hair flaming orange, and both appeared in public so heavily made up their faces had the appearance of masks” (Stone 29). Mars and Squire traveled all across France and explored the continent, becoming core figures in Gertrude Stein’s circle, and exhibiting consistently in high-profile shows. Mars also participated in American exhibitions, maintaining her relationships with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Society of Western Artists. From 1906 to 1913, Mars exhibited annually at the Paris Salons, both the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d’Automne. She also showed with the Salon de Nice, the Société de la gravure originale en couleurs, and the Société de la gravure sur bois originale. In 1912 and 1913, she sold a number of works to fashion designer Jacques Doucet, whose collection now forms the core of the Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA). 

Mars and Squire frequented the Girls’ Art Club at 4 rue de Chevreuse and participated in its cultural programming. Anne Goldthwaite, one of the key figures at the Club, stated that the couple’s eccentric appearances did not reflect the “exemplary lives” they led (Stone 29). Mars exhibited in the AWAA’s annual exhibition from 1907 to 1909 as well as in 1913. In 1914, she, Squire, and Edna Boies Hopkins formed the hanging committee for the show. Throughout all of her exhibitions, Mars was generally received positively by critics. Her woodblock prints were described as a “delight for those who follow with interest the progress of a craft reintroduced of recent years” (“American Women Artists Hold Annual Exhibition” 6), and Town and Country referred to Mars as a “young woman who… possessed… much decorative feeling…” (“American Exhibitors at the Salon” 10). According to artist Blanche Lazzell, Mars was a teacher and mentor to Ada Gilmore and Mildren McMillen while they resided at 4 rue de Chevreuse in 1913.

Mars, Ethel. Woodblocks for unidentified print. 20th century, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. Watercolor.
Mars, Ethel. Woodblocks for unidentified print. 20th century, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. Watercolor.
Mars, Ethel. Woodblocks for unidentified print. 20th century, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. Watercolor.
Mars, Ethel. Woodblocks for unidentified print. 20th century, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. Watercolor.

After almost a decade in Paris, the beginning of World War I drove Mars and Squire back to America. Upon returning to the United States, they moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, an artistic coastal town that was quickly becoming a hotspot for American artists fleeing the European continent. William H. Evaul describes the craze in a 1988 article for Cape Cod Antiquities and Arts: “Rent was cheap. Food was plentiful from the still burgeoning fishing fleet and the many local farms. And the community was receptive to artists. Or, at [sic] very least, tolerant of them” (89). Although artists of all different media converged in Provincetown, it was the printmakers with whom Mars and Squire found themselves most aligned. The couple rejoined old friends Edna Boies Hopkins, James Hopkins, Ada Gilmore, and Mildred McMillen, additionally befriending artists Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, Blanche Lazzell, and fellow AWAA alum Marguerite Zorach. Nordfeldt’s unique white-line woodcut technique, learned during his years in England, united the group through this specific style. Instead of the labor-intensive process of cutting multiple blocks to print one color at a time on the same sheet, Nordfeldt carved lines between fields of color then applied different colors using a thin medium like watercolor. As the grooves divided the pigments, Nordfelt could print a multi-color image using only one block. By 1918, the signature white outlines left by the colorless incisions came to dominate the visual language of the so-called Provincetown Printers. Mars, in particular, would experiment with woodblock printing for many years after she left Provincetown. Outside of producing large bodies of work, Mars and Squire taught woodcut classes, and exhibited locally and nationally. Mars showed annually with the Provincetown Art Association and occasionally with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Berlin Photographic Company, the National Arts Club, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Boston Arts Club. 

Following the end of WWI, Mars and Squire returned to Paris in the fall of 1920, but upon failing to find a “suitable studio” by December, they embarked on an extended sojourn in the south of France (“News of Americans Day by Day” 4). Some time around June 1921, the pair settled down in Vernon, a commune adjacent to Monet’s gardens in Giverny. Four years later, they moved south again to the artists’ colony in Vence where they mingled with famed artists Marsden Hartley, Oliver Chaffee, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, and Chaim Soutine. This was a period of immense artistic experimentation for Mars. She focused on oil painting and drawing rather than printmaking and even picked up new media like gouache and rug weaving. In 1928, Mars and Squire bought plots of land beside each other in Vence. For the next two years, they built the villa “La Farigoule,” where, with the exception of World War II, they would reside for the rest of their lives. Around the same time, they also purchased a car that they dubbed “Gaston” (Ryan 42). 

“Gaston” allowed Mars and Squire to make frequent trips to Paris, a particularly useful advantage considering their busy professional schedules. Ever since returning to France, Mars exhibited almost annually at the Salon d’Automne, where she was a sociétaire. As her practice metamorphosed across media, Mars continued to show new work; her ornamental wool rugs were noted for their “originality” in 1927 (“With Latin Quarter Folk,” October 14, 1927). Beyond the Salon, Mars was inducted into the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1922 and involved with the relatively nascent American Women’s Club of Paris, exhibiting in their 1932 art show. She showed with the Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale, with the Provincetown Art Association, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and at the Galerie Carmine. Mars and Squire were so well-regarded in the Parisian artistic community that, when they returned to Paris briefly in 1927 to serve on the jury for the Salon d’Automne, their studio at the rue Falguière was considered a “Left Bank mecca” by the New York Herald (“With Latin Quarter Folk” 9). 

When WWII began in 1939, Mars and Squire fled La Farigoule for a hotel in Goncelin, a commune located more inland near Grenoble. While Squire seemed to have paused making art completely, Mars persisted in drawing pensive, tranquil subjects and sometimes even including patriotic symbols. Despite continuing her artistic practice, she virtually stopped exhibiting during and after the war. By 1944, Mars worked mostly out of her notebooks, using watercolors, colored pencils, and graphite to sketch portraits of people around the French riviera. Although her professional life was far less ostentatious than her younger years, she remained eccentric in style and behavior up until her death. Dorothy Squire described Mars: 

...she wore long earrings, and had a half a dozen bracelets around each arm, ringing when she moved – To dress she never followed the fashion but only her own personal style – a summer dress in the winter if it was warm enough, and usually the same little felt hat of which she changed the trimming: a flower or a feather, or then, in hot weather, a little flat straw hat, chinese style, with a ribbon under her chin… After her (daily) marketing, Ethel sat at the cafe under the trees drinking her coca cola, to watch the people go by, or to have a chat with those she knew and sit at her table to take their cup of coffee. And when she came back home for lunch, first thing she’d howl on the door stop, ‘I’ve got some fine news,’ and she’d be telling all the village gossip’(Ryan 5). 

 

Mars died of congestive heart failure on March 23, 1959 at La Farigoule. She is buried beside Squire in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. 

During the middle of the 20th century, Mars, Squire, and the other Provincetown Printers faded into relative obscurity. Only in 1983, with Janet Flint’s seminal exhibition “Provincetown Printers: A Woodcut Tradition” at the National Museum of American Art, did these artists return to the public eye. From then on, Mars’ work has been shown at the Springfield Art Association and the MFA Boston. Her time in Paris has also been highlighted at the Galerie Berès and, most recently, the  National Portrait Gallery in their show “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900 - 1939.” 

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