Ethel Pye

Margaret Ethel Pye (1882–1960) was a British sculptor who worked in bronze and wood. In the 1910s she also created jewellery, of which some examples still remain. She was a member of a group of literary and artistic friends nicknamed by Virginia Woolf the "neo-pagans". Biography Margaret Ethel Pye was one of seven children (four brothers and two sisters) born to Margaret Thompson Kidston, daughter of James Burns Kidston of Glasgow, and William Arthur Pye JP from Exeter, a successful wine merchant and collector of oriental and contemporary art. She was the sister of the bookbinder Sybil Pye, the nurse Edith Pye and the engineer David Randall Pye. The family lived at Marylebone in London, where Ethel Pye grew up, before the family moved to Hampstead, then Surrey. Ethel Pye studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in central London and then exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1910 and with the Society of Women Artists on a regular basis from 1949 onwards. She was elected an Associate of the Society of Women Artists in 1950. Both Sybil and Ethel Pye attended the classes of Thomas Sturge Moore. Later Ethel Pye told Sturge Moore's wife, Marie Appia, that her sculptures "did not exist" until Sturge Moore had seen them; she also created costumes and masks based on Sturge Moore's designs for staging of his verse-plays. The family lived at Priest Hill, near the Olivier sisters (with whom Ethel and Sybil Pye became friends) in Limpsfield. Together with Rupert Brooke, who corresponded with her for many years, she was part of a group nicknamed by Virginia Woolf the "neo-pagans"; a number of whom remark on Pye in their writings.