THREE miles south of Petersfield, on the boundary of Hampshire and Sussex, stands a 2,000-year-old yew tree, one of the largest in a domestic setting. For centuries, it has shaded the former Yew Tree Cottage, now Hurstfield House, a picturesque patchwork of timber frame ranges dating from the 15th century.
It’s difficult to imagine an occupant less likely for this unpretentious dwelling than the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim (1898– 1979), doyenne of avant-garde art. Yet, in 1934, she bought it for £1,850 and immersed herself in the one truly domestic phase of her unconventional life. With its low beams, smallpaned windows and inglenook fireplace, the cottage was a far cry from the Parisian apartments, Manhattan duplexes and Venetian palazzi that were her customary abodes, but Peggy shipped over her Venetian furniture from Paris, ordered sheepskin rugs from Suffolk and settled into English rural life. A particular attraction was the setting: ‘The whole countryside seemed to be a part of it. It was at the foot of the downs, but we were actually in a valley and we had a stream running through our garden, which was all sloping,’ she wrote. She loved the woods ‘filled with wild garlic and later with bluebells, campion and irises… the heavenly cry of the cuckoo and at night there were nightingales’.
Peggy’s five years at Yew Tree Cottage marked a turning point in her life. She arrived desolate from the recent death of her greatest love, John Holms, still searching for some direction and hoping perhaps to find catharsis through her new liaison with Douglas Garman, a Marxist publisher and poet. Brought up in New York among the Jewish haute bourgeoisie, she’d experienced early unhappiness and the tragic deaths of her father and sister.
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
