October in Broadway was magnificent — sunny days with white fluffy clouds and blue sky, cool evenings walking down country lanes, trees just beginning to turn to autumn colors. My sister Peggy joined me in London and we took trains and taxis from there to Broadway in the Cotswolds (not without some ‘adventures’!) and stayed at The Manor Cottages, an 18th century mansion with cottages on many acres of country fields, a ten-minute walk into the village, and sculpted gardens to wander about in. The owner is the director of the Broadway Art Festival, an annual event, and she was very helpful to me for my research, having also been the director of the Broadway Historical Society for several years. I walked on the same paths and streets that John Singer Sargent and his American friends did — the “American Artist Colony” was famous and notorious (to the locals) in the village: Frank and Lily Millet and Edward (Ned) Austin Abbey, both men illustrators for popular magazines and special editions of Dickens and Shakespeare. They were joined by a host of British and European visitors from 1884 through the early 1890’s, among them: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, the Alma-Tademas, Edmund Gosse, many of the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their families, and other literary and art-world personages. Here are some photos of our time in Broadway.
