This page is a work in progress, and will be updated with additional information about Julia Ellsworth Ford.

Relationship to john william waterhouse:

Collector, owner of Danae.

Brief Biography:

FORD, Julia Ellsworth (1859-1950) 

Julia Ellsworth Ford, neé Shaw, was a New York socialite, philanthropist, author of children's books and doyenne of a salon that included the Lebanese mystic Kahlil Gibran, Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, and American dancer Isadora Duncan. Her husband was Simeon Ford, financier and noted host of the old Grand Union Hotel, New York (co-owned with Julia's brother Samuel Shaw).

Mrs. Ford "though extremely wealthy, was more interested in meeting famous people, whom she collected as others did stamps or butterflies, than in disbursing her capital: "the woman who aspires" was the way he described her to Florence Farr." (from a 1905 letter by John Quinn quoted in Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats, William Michael Murphy.)

Source: various google searches

DOCUMENTED RELATIONSHIP:

- She was personally acquainted with Waterhouse:

"Mrs. Ford had a great interest in the Pre-Raphaelite painters and later artists such as JW Waterhouse and Arthur Hacker, both of whom she knew personally. She went to Germany to meet the German painter Franz von Stuck and to get photographic reproductions of his work. She created her own wallpaper for her upstairs study by arranging on the walls as a mosaic over two hundred photographic reproductions of pictures by these artists."  

Source: The Yale University Library Gazette, 1926 

- Owner of Waterhouse's painting Danae which was stolen from her New York residence (see the Anthony Hobson 1980 monograph). The present whereabouts of Danae is still unknown.