Clare Consuelo Sheridan (née Frewen; 9 September 1885 – 31 May 1970) was an English sculptor, journalist and writer, known primarily for creating busts for famous sitters and keeping travel diaries.

[1] She was a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, with whom she had enjoyed an amicable relationship, though her support for the October Revolution in 1917 caused them to break ranks politically.

William Sheridan was a captain in the Rifle Brigade and was killed in the First World War while leading his men at the Battle of Loos in September 1915,[6] a few days after the birth of the couple's third child, their son Richard.

[7] In the summer of 1920, the first Soviet Russian trade delegation to visit London invited Sheridan to travel to Russia to make busts of notable revolutionaries.

When she returned to London, Churchill refused to see her, and after finding herself widely shunned in polite society due to her support of Bolshevism, she moved to America.

Also making the crossing was Commander Hugo W. Koehler, USN, the American naval spy who was returning to America from ten months spent with the White army in the Crimea.

"[13] In a letter Koehler wrote in 1922, he mentioned the "famous Mrs. Sheridan at whom the Foreign Office thundered so loudly... and yet be it known (although this, of course, is closely guarded) that she was an agent for the British Intelligence Service.

She was also introduced to Herbert Swope, the editor of the New York World who, impressed by her account of her time in Russia which had been published as Russian Portraits, offered her a job as the papers' roving European correspondent.

As she was believed to have installed herself in a battleship under French protection at the preceding Mudania conference, with France having undermined Britain's efforts to keep the Bosphorus open, and to have had an affair with Kemal Atatürk, Curzon asked Harold Nicolson (an attending Foreign Office diplomat) to 'try and get rid of her'.

[7] In 1924, Sheridan and her brother, Royal Navy officer Oswald Frewen, made a then-daring long-distance motorcycle riding journey from Sussex through Europe to the USSR, ending in Odessa.

In 1935, Sheridan’s 19-year old son, Richard Brinsley, began to make a name for himself as a writer, when he published his book Heavenly Hell: The Experiences of an Apprentice in a Four-Mast Barque, describing his ten-months in Gustaf Erikson’s windjammer Lawhill.

After the war she converted to Roman Catholicism, travelling to Assisi for that purpose before moving to live in a guest house run by the Franciscan convent at Hope Castle at Castleblayney in Ireland.

Sheridan's busts of her first cousin Churchill can be found at Blenheim Palace, Chartwell, Harrow School and Hastings Town Hall; the original plaster is in the possession of her great-nephew Jonathan Frewen.

Some items from her large collection of Native American artefacts are on display at Hastings Museum and in the Frewen family's ancestral village of Brede in Sussex.