Tag: John Singer Sargent

Broadway Visitors in 1892

James Bettner Ludlow
James Bettner Ludlow (1859-1921)

From the mid 1880s, the rural idyll of Broadway became a popular destination for visitors from across the world. The Broadway Colony of artists, composers and writers, some of whom made Broadway their home, attracted a number of their friends from Europe and America to the village. Local newspapers regularly published lists of people who visited and stayed in the area at the time. The Evesham Journal reported in October 1892 that the following visitors had been staying in Broadway that summer:

Argyle Parade: Miss Murray (from London), Miss Paton (Wales), Mr Clutterbuck (Merioneth)

Cowley House, hosted by Mrs Righton: Mr & Mrs J.T. Morris and family1 (Ballinaboy House, Ireland)

The Green, Mrs Stanley: Mrs Harris and Mr Edward Harris (Windsor)

Ivy House, Mrs Holcroft: Miss Macpherson (Lichfield), Miss Davis (Bilston), Mr & Mrs Norton (Edgbaston)

The Low Farm, Miss Tennant: Major Corbett (Worcester)

J.W. Lill & Sons, Birmingham

The Lygon Arms Hotel, Charles Drury: Mr C Dixon, Mr H.M. Dixon, Miss Dora Dixon (Edgbaston), Mr Fred G. Clarke (Eastbourne), Mr. G.H.M. Morley (Birmingham), Mr J.W. Lill, Mr A. Lill, Mr D. Lill (Solihull), Monsieur Louis Saurin (Rue des Roses, Paris), Mr W.J. Gale2 (Toronto, Canada), Mr James Bettner Ludlow3 (New York), Mr & Mrs James Smith (Moseley, Birmingham), Mr & Mrs Lewis (Gloucester), Mr Joel Wainwright4 (Finchwood, Marple, Derbyshire), Mr & Mrs Schiefflein (New York), Mr J.H. Payne (Birmingham).

The Lygon Cottage, Charles Drury: Mr & Mrs John Baker and family (Pershore)

North Place Mrs John White: Mr & Mrs J.H. Bacon (Highgate)

North Street, Mrs C. Bunn: Mr Dyer (Cambridge)

Russell House Cottage: The Misses Barnard5

The Knapp Farm, Mrs S. Savage: Mr Peach (Straford-upon-Avon), Captain Henry Allfrey6 (Stratford)

The Swan Hotel, Mr J. Brick: Miss Maun (Bridgnorth) and Mr A. Maun (Shrewsbury), Mr F.W. Land (Leamington), Mr H. Jenkins, Mr C. Daniel, Mr W. Perrot (Bordesley)

 

Notes:

  1. The Morris family were Irish landed gentry who had inherited part of the estate of the Frenchs of Errislannan and they had a house in Ballinaboy, Co. Galway.
  2. J. W. Gale was a wholesale dealer in staple and fancy dry goods, woollens, tailors’ furnishings, and gents’ furnishings with premises at 24 and 26 Wellington Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Gale was the manufacturer of the celebrated “Gale Shirt Collars and Cuffs”.
  3. James Bettner Ludlow (1859-1921). James Ludlow was an expert on real estate law. Most of his time was employed in the management of the estate owned by himself and his sister, Annie, which embraced most of the water front of South Yonkers in New York.
  4. Joel Wainwright was a naturalist, author of ‘Memories of Marple’ and one of the publishers of The Strines Journal.
  5. Frederick Barnard’s daughters, Dorothy and Polly, served as the models for John Singer Sargent’s painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose which was painted in Broadway in the mid 1880s.
  6. Henry Allfrey was born on 9th September 1850. He was educated at Cheltenham College and entered the army in 1868, being gazetted Ensign on 19th May to the 2nd Battalion 60th Rifles. Promoted Lieutenant on 28th October 1871 and Captain on 29th September 1880. He saw service during the Zulu War. Captain Allfrey was the father of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Walter Allfrey, Commanding Officer of V Corps in North Africa and Italy 1942-44.

 

 

Debbie Williamson
Broadway History Society

 

 

 

 

Broadway in 1887

The following article about Broadway was published in the Gloucestershire Echo on 24th August 1887 and the Cheltenham Chronicle on 27th August 1887:

Broadway is geographically in Gloucestershire but topographically is a peninsula of Worcestershire which juts out into the neighbouring shire. Broadway is about five and a half miles from anywhere, and just six miles from everywhere. Two hundred years ago, or even so far back as Shakespeare’s days, Broadway may have been a place of note. Now it is a place of no account, except as one of the quietest, sweetest, most peaceful, and most pastoral “out of the world’ villages in all England. It consists of one wide, straggling street, of quaint old stone-built houses with gables and dormers, Tudor chimneys, casements with leaded panes of old glass, mullions, carved doorways, finials and high-pitched roofs. There is an amazing hotel, the Lygon Arms, which would have driven Dickens wild with delight, and in another ancient hostelry, now turned into a private residence, are the old oak beams and floors, old windows and wide chimney-nooks which were there when Charles I slept – or more probably only laid down his uneasy head – after a disastrous battle. On the walls of these fine houses apricots and vines grow freely, and their fruits ripen.

There is a village green, the chosen club of all the village dogs, who romp and race there from morning till night. The well-planned kennels of the North Cotswold Hounds are in the village, and when they are seen coming down the wide street the way in which the other dogs “get up and slide” is most diverting.

At the extreme end of Broadway in an old house, with an old garden, shut in by a high old wall, an American colony of artists1 have established themselves, painting and drawing all day long with intervals of lawn-tennis for exercise; and there, the world forgetting, but not by the world forgot, they lead an ideal life of work and art and simple healthful occupation. They have their models male and female, after their kind in an adjacent cottage; and they have fitted up a great old barn as a studio, from which are sent out many notable pictures.

The country round about Broadway is a mixture of flat cornlands and rolling hills, profusely timbered with splendid elms, ash-trees, and oaks, and the district is literally studded with old abbey barns, old manor houses, and old churches, in most quaint and picturesque styles of architecture. Beautiful walks through pastures and coppices, over hills, superabound in every direction. People in search of quietness, fresh air, and something rather out of the common-place in rural life might do worse than find their way to Broadway. To get there is not just as easy as to get to Charing Cross, but it can be done by taking the train to Evesham, or utilising a smart four-horse coach2 that leaves the Plough at Cheltenham for Broadway every Saturday afternoon at five o’clock, for a delightfully picturesque drive of sixteen miles to Broadway. The very difficulty of getting to Broadway enhances its charm of isolation. If it were nearer a railway-station it would be more noisy and less nice.

Debbie Williamson
Broadway History Society

Notes:
1. The Broadway Colony of artists included; the American artist Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912) who lived at Farnham House and Russell House and also rented Abbot’s Grange on the village green, and John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) who painted Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in the gardens of Farnham House and Russell House during the summers of 1885 and 1886 whilst staying with the Millet family. Millet’s most famous painting Between Two Fires was painted at Abbot’s Grange. Frederick Barnard, an illustrator of Charles Dickens’ novels and the portraitist Paul César Helleu were also visitors to Broadway at the time. The Artist Colony Room at Broadway Museum and Art Gallery provides an insight into their art and their lives.
2. The Four-Horse Coach started running between Broadway and Cheltenham in August 1887. The coach ran every Saturday at 9am from the Lygon Arms Hotel, Broadway, calling at the White Hart Hotel, Winchcombe, to The Plough Hotel, Cheltenham, returning at 5pm the same day.

John Singer Sargent – Talk by Mary Alexander

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Mary Alexander

On Wednesday 8th February 2017 at 8pm, Mary Alexander will give a talk entitled Fizz and Crackle: Imagination, Innovation and Curiosity in the work of John Singer Sargent at Evesham Arts Centre, Victoria Avenue, Evesham WR11 4QH.

American artist John Singer Sargent RA (1856-1925) made the quiet Cotswolds village of Broadway his home during the mid 1880s, and became a member of the ‘Broadway Colony’ a bohemian crowd of artists and writers living in the village. Whilst in Broadway, Sargent painted what has become his most famous painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in the gardens of Russell House and Farnham House.

Sargent is regarded as the leading society portrait painter of his generation and Art History lecturer and tutor, Mary Alexander, will explore his extraordinary inventiveness and technical brilliance across a range of media and subjects.

Tickets £7 on the door. For further details tel. 01386 48883.