The village of Broadway is today - as it was a
century ago - a popular place for
foreign visitors. It was the
chosen idyllic spot of an American artistic
colony who made it
there home in the 1880s.
John Singer Sargent paid his first visit to Broadway in
September 1885 to recuperate from a bad
head wound received while diving from a weir. He had
been invited to go to this little Worcestershire
village by his friend, the American painter Edwin
Austin Abbey.
Broadway, then little known and
remote from the railway, was the home of a small
colony of artists, many of whom were, like
Sargent, expatriate Americans. It was here that
Sargent painted what was later to become one of
his best loved pictures, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
Broadway was 'discovered' by the American
illustrator and painter Francis Millet, in 1885k It was
then - and still is - an idyllic spot at the extreme
south-eastern corner of Worcestershire, tucked
into the foot of the Cotswolds overlooking the Vale
of Evesham. Its long main street, lined with 16th and 17th-century stone cottages, leads to the
village green.
This was the view that prompted the
biographer and novelist E. V Lucas, to write of the
'wide, long, grass-bordered vistas of brownish-
grey cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled,
mended, ivied, immemorial. It is hardly surprising
that this quintessentially English rural charm
should have cast its spell on the American visitors.'
RURAL HAVEN
The last few decades of the 19th century had
witnessed a vogue for artists' colonies. In Britain
alone, groups of artists gravitated to remote parts
of the country where they could work in
picturesque rural or romantic surroundings, well
away from the dirt and the noise of the cities.
Around the time that Broadway was in its heydav,
other artists had occupied Newlyn in Cornwall,
Whitby in Yorkshire and Walberswick in Suffolk.
Echoing the French Impressionists, much of
whose work was painted in the countryside, artists
in England aimed to capture the fleeting effect of
light and shade in pastoral surroundings.
Francis Millet and his family first moved to
Farnham House, which overlooked the village
 green in Broadway. They acquired this along with
a l4th-century monastic ruin known as Abbot's
Grange which they restored and converted into a studio. Millet
was soon joined by a host of English
and American friends, namely the painters
Edwin Abbey, Sargent, George Boughton, Alfred Parson
(illustrator of Dickens' work), Edwin Blashfield,
the English illustrator Fred Barnard and the writer
Henry James and Edmund Gross.
With the sole exception of Henry James, the
friends had a talent for the unruly, semi- bohemian
hospitality that was fashionable among artists at
this time. They were a strangely assorted company
colourful and noisy, but above all united
in intellectual and artistic interests. They frequently
shattered the calm of the village with their high spirits, as is
described here by Edmund Gosse: 'Nothing we do scandalizes the
villagers. Fred
Barnard, with an enormous stage slouch hat over
his shoulders, chased one of the Americans down
the village street, the man chased screaming all the
time and trying to escape up lamp-posts and down
wells. Not a villager smiled ... Whatever we do or
say or wear or sing they only say "Them
Americans is out again".'
HIGH SPIRITS
Letters written by the Broadway residents and
visitors are our main source of information  about
the high-spirited lifestyle there. A certain amount
of serious work was done, but this was well
interspersed with tennis, tea, musical evenings,
dances and tennis again. In 1886, Gosse wrote a
description of Abbot's Grange, and the new use to
which it was being put: 'A mediaeval ruin, a small
ecclesiastical edifice, which was very roughly
repaired so as to make a kind of refuge for us, and
there, in the morning, Henry James and I would
write, while Abbey and Millet painted on the floor
below, and Sargent and Parsons tilted their easels
just outside. We were all within shouting distance,
and not much serious work was done, for we were
in towering spirits and everything was food for
laughter. Henry James was the only sedate one of
all - benign, indulgent but grave, and not often
unbending beyond a genial chuckle.'
Another letter, written by Edwin Abbey, tells
more: Millet is painting two interiors, Barnard is
doing various sketches, and I've been painting a
little watercolour of a very draughty church. There
are three models down from town all eating their heads off today...
F. Anstey Guthrie is coming this week to stay with us awhile, and
later on Austin Dobson.'
When visitors came to stay, they frequently lodged
at the Lygon Arms, a dominating and beautiful former 16th-century
manor house at the edge of the Green. Sargent stayed there at first,
as did Abbey, who used some of the detailsof the building in the
backgrounds to his illustrations to Goldsmith's play She Stoops
to Conquer.
Music was a great source of pleasure to the friends.
Abbey wrote, 'We have music until the house won't stand it. Sargent
is going elaborately through Wagner's trilogy, recitatives and
all ... Miss Gertrude Giswold sings to us like an angel.' There
are also tales of games and dancing:'We really do have a gay summer,
pretending to work and sometimes working ... until four, and then
tennis until dinner time, and after dinner, dancing and music and
various cheering games in the studio, but mostly dancing.' In such
a frivolous atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the community
were fundamentally artificial, and
eventually this became apparent. Abbey had met
his wife, Mary, in 1888, when they were both
guests of the Millets at Russell House in Broadway.
They went to America together, returning as a
married couple in 1890, but not to so sunny an
atmosphere as before. Mary, who was an
outspoken, dominating woman and rather frosty
her manner, felt the unbuttoned communal lift
at Broadway was not sufficiently Serious for her
husband. She even doubted that the others had
the appropriate respect of Abbey's work. And she
wanted to be mistress in her own home.
During his stay in America Abbey had, with
Sargent, been commissioned to paint a large mural
cycle for Boston Public Library. He had planned to
execute these in Broadway, but his wife had other
ideas. Instead of remaining with the community,
and their narrow, illustrators' horizons, Mary and
Edwin Abbey bought an old English country
house in Fairford,
40 miles  south
of Broadway. There they were followed by Sargent, and, in time,
by Henry James. The heart, and the major artistic
driving force, were thus removed from Broadway,
and as an artistic community it faded.
Perhaps Henry James, who had throughout
remained characteristically a little detached from
the others, should have the last word about
Broadway before the idylI was finally shattered:
'furnished apartments are useful to the artist, but a
furnished country is even more so... This is the
great recommendation of Broadway: everything in
it is convertible . . There is portraiture in the air
and composition in the very accidents. Everthing
is a subject or an effect....It is delicious to be at Broadway
and not have to draw.'
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