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.
Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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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.
