The Broadway Arts Festival in June 2010 will celebrate Sargent’s world-famous painting, Broadway’s artistic heritage and the village’s link with a number of artists, writers and musicians. The Lygon family, who were bestowed the title of Earl Beauchamp in 1815, were one of the many families in Broadway’s past who were responsible for creating its rich and diverse artistic heritage. Indeed, it was thanks to the generosity and foresight of Frederick Lygon, 6th Earl Beauchamp that helped the guild of craftsmen move from London to the north Cotswolds, where the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement were nurtured and practised. Many of Broadway’s houses and gardens were consequently built or altered during this time, incorporating the ideals of this movement by embracing nature and craftsmanship and avoiding modern technology.
During the early 1880s, William Morris, one of the key figures in this movement, adopted Broadway Tower as his holiday retreat together with his friends Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Rossetti. It is because of Morris’s views and vision that the watercolourist and garden designer Alfred Parsons first visited Broadway along with his American journalist friend Lawrence Dutton. The short walk from the Tower, down Fish Hill to the sleepy village of Broadway with its broad high street lined with honey-coloured limestone houses and cottages with the 16th century Lygon Arms Inn at its centre, was all it took to entice them to live in Broadway and thus a colony of artists, the Broadway Colony, soon followed suit.
Writers and poets were also drawn to the village during this time. Henry James, E V Lucas and Edmund Gosse were captured by the spirit of Broadway and its ‘glimpse’ of old England and felt that here they had discovered Shakespeare’s true country. They were, in fact, benefitting from the consequences of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, when labourers left the countryside seeking better work in the towns. This, coupled with the new London to Worcester railway bypassing the village, resulted in Broadway for this short time being blissfully quiet and empty. It was this reason that enabled Francis Millet and his family to rent the empty Farnham House on the village green where, in 1885, his friend John Singer Sargent, having fled Paris following the scandal and condemnation of Madame X (portrait of Mme Pierre Gautreau née Virginie Avegno), is thought to have started to paint his iconic work Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. The work was completed during the summer of 1886 in the grounds of nearby Russell House, where the adjacent medieval Abbot’s Grange had also been converted into artist studios.
The lure of Shakespeare also brought many thespians to Broadway, with one notable actress Mary Anderson, the first American actress to play Rosalind at Stratford-upon-Avon, being so taken by the village that she and her husband Antonio de Navarro bought Court Farm and made Broadway their home. Their celebrity status brought many more artistic types to Broadway and with composer Maude Valerie White living next door in Bell Farm, intimate concerts and great composing were hence encouraged at the top end of the High Street. Edward Elgar, another Worcestershire great also found its quiet cottages and meadows most inspirational.
Being just a short distance away from Stanway House, Sudeley Castle, Snowshill Manor, Sezincote, Hidcote Manor, Kiftsgate Court and Madresfield Court (ancestral home for several centuries of the Lygon family) Broadway can boast many more interesting stories enlightening us of its creative past: from Sir Gordon Russell learning and plying his trade, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edmund Gosse and Edwin Blashfield enjoying games of tennis at Russell House, Evelyn Waugh enjoying The Lygon Arms, Sir JM Barrie’s cricket team, the Allahakberries, playing cricket against Mary Anderson de Navarro’s team of artists on the village green, JMW Turner sketching en route to Evesham and German prisoners of war painting delightful pictures of Broadway on old bits of wood. It is clear that Broadway’s artistic path has been well trodden, inspiring many a visitor along the way.
The Broadway Colony of artists will all be commemorated in the 2010 Broadway Arts Festival, along with Sargent’s friend and illustrator Frederick Barnard, whose daughters, Dorothy and Polly are the girls dressed in white smocks seen in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose lighting Japanese lanterns with tapers at dusk. Fred Barnard and his family also made Broadway their summer retreat during the 1880s.
During the 2010 Festival the exhibition of paintings, sculpture and letters to be held at Trinity House will include a number of works by Sargent generously loaned from public and private collections including, courtesy of Tate Britain two preparatory sketches of Dorothy and Polly Barnard the models for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. The exhibition will also include three watercolour drawings on loan from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
The 2010 Festival will also feature plays (including an original play by Hugh Brewster, Canadian author who has studied Sargent, telling the story behind the iconic painting), musical concerts, a flower festival, an Open Art Competition, an arts and crafts exhibition by the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen and many other community based events.
