An air of homely distinction

A Cotswold house beloved by an important Edwardian AngloAmerican artistic circle has been revived and restored. John Martin Robinson tells its remarkable story

- Paul Highnam

AS do many Cotswold villages, composed of picturesque stone houses, cottages and inns erected between the 15th and 18th centuries, Broadway owed its wealth to the medieval wool trade and later to its position as an important coaching stop on the main road between London and Worcester. With the Industrial Revolution, cotton textiles, coal, iron and engineering overtook wool as Britain's major business and exports.

Bypassed by industry, Broadway lost its other mainstay when the opening of the Worcester railway in 1852 rapidly eclipsed horse transport and the coach trade.

Economic decline preserved buildings and landscape, in the same way that it did in Tuscany and Umbria. As Florence and central Italy attracted Anglo-American artists and aesthetes in the late 19th and early 20th century, so did the Cotswolds. The contribution of Arts-and-Crafts architects, fin de siècle artists, writers and musicians gave the place an international aesthetic dimension.

From the 1880s onwards, Broadway saw the arrival of a group of English and American artists and writers, encouraged by William Morris, who retreated in the summer to Broadway Tower, James Wyatt’s folly that stands above Broadway on the Cotswold escarpment. They came first as summer visitors, staying at the Lygon Arms, the old coaching inn, or in rented houses. The key figures were John Singer Sargent and his friends, the Harvard-educated American painter Francis Davis Millet (1846–1912), and Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911), both of whom worked as illustrators for Harper’s

Magazine in New York, and, like Sargent, had careers on both sides of the Atlantic. Picturesque Broadway offered a respite from the busy artistic scene of London and, in the case of Millet and Abbey, settings for their historicising paintings and illustrations.