A World Of Pure Imagination

Fringed with cities of world-class culture and filled with festivals galore, it’s no surprise that artistic buyers continue to follow in the footsteps of literary giants and make their homes in the Cotswolds

- Arabella Youens

ALTHOUGH much of its limelight today is dominated by the activities of the well-heeled media crowd in fashionable north Cotswolds (apparently 70% of the UK’s film and TV industry professionals own property in the area), the Cotswolds has long proved a magnet to a group of more camera-shy buyers: artists and writers.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, a string of literary luminaries called the Cotswolds home, using the landscape of rolling countryside, steep valleys and lost-in-time villages as inspiration for their work. Of them all, it is the lyrical portrait of Laurie Lee’s Cotswold boyhood in Cider With Rosie, published in 1959, that has—much as Hardy did in the West Country 70 years earlier—captured the essence of a special corner of the English countryside, of buttercup fields, brambles and badger setts (see page 94). But it didn’t begin there, of course. The Anglo-American artist John Singer Sargent (left) painted one of his most famous works, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, in the garden of his friend’s house in Broadway during the autumn of 1885 (‘A blooming masterpiece’, January 9). At about the same time, the honey-coloured stone houses that are synonymous with the Cotswolds —built from wealth generated by the wool industry at a time when sheep outnumbered people in the area—attracted the admiring eyes of Arts-and-Crafts movers and shakers. Chief among them was William Morris, who signed a joint lease on Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade, with his artist friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He summered there from 1871 until his death in 1896.