Friday 11 – Sunday 20 June 2010 - Broadway Arts Festivalbroadwayartsfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BAF_40pp_c… · Introduction by Richard Ormond CBE Broadway is writ

Friday 11th – Sunday 20th June 2010A celebration of the work of John Singer Sargent RA (1856 - 1925) and the Broadway Colony

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose painted in Broadway, The Cotswolds. © Tate, London 2009

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Friday 11th – Sunday 20th June 2010

A celebration of the work of John Singer Sargent RA (1856 - 1925)

and the Broadway Colony

The exhibition will be opened by Richard Ormond CBE

The committee are privileged to have the interest and support of Richard Ormond CBE, who has the double distinction of being not only the great nephew of John Singer Sargent, but who is also a distinguished academic. He was Director of The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, from 1986 - 2000, following eight years as Deputy Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Publications include works on Lord Leighton, Sir Edwin Landseer, F. X. Winterhalter and others, as well as several works on Sargent. He leads the panel publishing the Catalogue Raisonné of Sargent’s entire works.

Front cover: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

86 x 77.5 inches. Oils on canvas. © Tate, London 2009

The version hanging in the exhibition is a slightly smaller gicleé print taken from the

original painting.

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John Singer Sargent painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in Broadway.

Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Gift of Mrs Francis Ormond, 1937.7.27.1.A

Broadway Arts Festival 2010 Catalogue Contents

John Singer Sargent, Painting ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ in Broadway .................................................................................................. 5

Introduction, by Richard Ormond CBE .................................................................................................................................................... 6

John Singer Sargent, Candelabrum ........................................................................................................................................................ 7

John Singer Sargent, Biography ............................................................................................................................................................. 8

John Singer Sargent, Guinevere ............................................................................................................................................................. 9

John Singer Sargent, House and Garden, Nice.................................................................................................................................... 10

John Singer Sargent, In the Orchard..................................................................................................................................................... 11

John Singer Sargent, Polly Barnard ...................................................................................................................................................... 12

John Singer Sargent, Dorothy Barnard ................................................................................................................................................. 13

John Singer Sargent, A portrait of Violet ................................................................................................................................................ 14

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Sir Charles Tennant ............................................................................................................................. 15

John Singer Sargent, Two figures in a boat, Isola Bella, Italy ................................................................................................................ 16

John Singer Sargent, Simplon - Mrs Barnard and daughter Dorothy .................................................................................................... 17

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Mrs Barnard and Miss Williams .......................................................................................................... 18

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Margot Asquith ................................................................................................................................... 19

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Mary .................................................................................................................................................... 19

John Singer Sargent, Donkey ............................................................................................................................................................... 20

John Singer Sargent, Garden at Fladbury Rectory ................................................................................................................................ 21

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of an Italian Model .................................................................................................................................. 22

John Singer Sargent, The Crucifix ......................................................................................................................................................... 23

Francis Davis Millet, Biography ............................................................................................................................................................. 24

Francis Davis Millet, Boys Fishing, Venice ............................................................................................................................................ 25

Francis Davis Millet, Portrait of Lily Millet ............................................................................................................................................... 26

Francis Davis Millet, Portrait of Lady Lifford ........................................................................................................................................... 27

Francis Davis Millet, Portrait head ......................................................................................................................................................... 28



Francis Davis Millet, Study of a lance, a saddle and other military accoutrements ............................................................................... 31

Phil May, Biography ............................................................................................................................................................................... 32

Phil May, Mme de Navarro..................................................................................................................................................................... 32

Phil May, Back Er Nellie Packer ............................................................................................................................................................. 33

Phil May, Nellie Packer ‘97 .................................................................................................................................................................... 33

Fred Barnard, Portrait of the Barnard children ....................................................................................................................................... 34

Laura Alma-Tadema, Biography ............................................................................................................................................................ 35

Laura Alma-Tadema, Oranges and Lemons ......................................................................................................................................... 35

Paul César Helleu, Biography ............................................................................................................................................................... 36

Paul César Helleu, Madame Helleu at Fladbury, chez John Singer Sargent, 1889 ............................................................................... 37

Alfred Parsons, Biography ..................................................................................................................................................................... 38

Alfred Parsons, Japanese Paeonies ..................................................................................................................................................... 38

Broadway Arts Festival 2012 Preview ................................................................................................................................................... 39

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Introduction by Richard Ormond CBE

Broadway is writ large across the career of the young John Singer Sargent. The son of expatriate American parents, he was born in Florence in 1856, brought up in Europe and trained as an artist in Paris, in the studio of Carolus-Duran, a fashionable portrait painter. It was not long before the gifted Sargent was making his mark at the Salon, the official annual exhibition in Paris, with portraits of rare power and insight and sensational subject paintings. He was talked of as the coming man, with his daring compositions that proclaimed him as a modernist and an aesthete. This early success ended in humiliation when his portrait of Madame Gautreau or Madame X, as it was coyly titled at the time, was branded eccentric and outrageous at the Salon of 1884. Bruised by the scandal, Sargent sought solace among his friends in England, eventually moving to London in 1886.

The previous year he had joined the colony of Anglo-American artists centred on the village of Broadway. No longer in demand as a portrait painter, Sargent turned his attention to landscape during this and succeeding summers. A close friend of Claude Monet, he had been exposed to the latest trends in French painting, and out of these he fashioned his own brand of impressionism. The light-filled canvasses of the Broadway years, with their casual point of view, vibrant colour and broken brushwork, placed the artist firmly in the ranks of the avant-garde. No other artist in England at the time was producing anything so original or so radical. Among the works in the current exhibition are two entrancing landscapes, the first, House and Garden, Nice, painted in the south of France a year or two before the first visit to the Cotswolds, the second, In the Orchard, painted at Broadway. They capture the atmosphere of hot summer days in a brilliant, staccato shorthand. A second Broadway painting of a woman smoking a cigarette at the dinner table, framed by the branches of two candelabra, is one of those intimate, tender portrayals of which Sargent is such a master.

Sargent’s experiments in plein-air painting culminated in the famous picture of two little girls lighting Japanese lanterns at nightfall that he memorably named Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, the title of a popular song of the time. He mastered the complexities of painting the little girls in white posed before the tangled flowers and foliage of the garden, and of reconciling the violet tones of twilight with the artificial light of the lanterns, in a picture that simply glows with colour. Though there are many studies for the work, the painting itself was done entirely out-of-doors in front of the motif, during the few moments that the light lasted. The picture won the hearts of the public when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887, and bought for the nation by the trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, and it has remained one of his best loved works.

The models for the picture were Dorothy and Polly Barnard, daughters of an artist friend, and beautiful studies of their heads have been lent to the exhibition by the Tate Gallery. I can just remember Dorothy Barnard, my brother’s godmother, who in the late 1940s was still living on the hill above Broadway where she had posed sixty years earlier. She and her mother and sister often accompanied Sargent on his sketching holidays in the Alps, and the exhibition includes a charming water-colour of Mrs Barnard and Dorothy reclining at ease in an Alpine meadow, painted at the Simplon Pass around 1910.

Broadway was important to Sargent personally as well as professionally. He came to the village in depressed spirits, and the support of his artist friends helped to restore his morale. Frank and Lily Millet, Alfred Parsons, Edwin Austin Abbey and Alice Barnard and her daughters, all became lifelong friends, along with the writers Edmund Gosse and Henry James. Later on the celebrated American actress Mary Anderson and her husband Antonio de Navarro joined the group, and they are commemorated here in a charcoal portrait of Mary, and a bronze crucifix which the artist gave them. In the convivial life of the colony, centred first on Farnham House, later on Russell House, outings, picnics, parties and charades were the order of the day, though much serious painting was also done. The camaraderie and high spirits of this talented group of artists and writers was infectious and has become the stuff of legend. As the theme of its first festival, Broadway could not have chosen a better subject.

Sargent spent two summers at Broadway, and then moved on to Henley, to Calcot near Reading and to Fladbury on the Avon. There are two pictures in the show from the Fladbury season (1889), the first a picture of the terraced garden of the old Rectory which Sargent rented for the summer, the second a portrait of his beautiful young sister Violet, captured momentarily at the dining table, her lips parted, her face lit up. She was my grandmother, but I knew her only in old age, living in a large, dark flat on the Chelsea embankment covered from floor to ceiling with her brother’s work. She was a woman of strong character who had lived an adventurous life, but for a young boy, trying to behave and sit still, visits to Banny, as we called her, were something of an ordeal.

The landscapes that Sargent painted in England in the 1880s are dreamy and delicious. They mark an important phase of his art and his career, a rare interlude between two major bouts of portrait painting. In 1887, on his first professional visit to the United States, Sargent enjoyed a triumphant homecoming. He was liberally patronized and lionized in Boston and New York, painting no fewer than twenty commissioned portraits. His career as the greatest Anglo-American portrait painter of the age was well and truly launched. Six years later he swept all before him at the Royal Academy with his stunning portrait of Lady Agnew. Over the course of the next fifteen years he created an unforgettable image of the Edwardian age and its leading figures in politics, society and the arts, the ‘Van Dyck of our Times’ as the sculptor Rodin dubbed him. He abandoned portraiture at the height of his fame in 1907 in order to concentrate on his murals in the Boston Public Library and on landscapes and figure subjects. The Great War brought to an end the gilded age of which Sargent had been the pre-eminent recorder, but two great paintings, Gassed and The Generals of the First World War mark another point in his career. He died at his home, 31 Tite Street, Chelsea, on 15th April 1925, aged sixty-nine.

John Singer SargentCandelabrum – 1885

20.75 x 26.25 inches. Oils on canvas. Courtesy of Jan and Warren Adelson.

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray write:This is an impressionistic study of a young woman seated at a table and probably painted by artificial light. She is in a loose white dress, and her head is framed by the arms of a twin-headed candelabrum of neo-classical design, with three white roses decorating the stem; a slight sketch of the same candelabrum is visible to the left. The picture was reduced to its present proportions in New York in 1922. Martin Birnbaum, who acted for Scott & Fowles in buying the picture at the Christie’s sale, wrote to Sargent on 21 April 1922:“I am also sending a photograph of an unfinished painting which we purchased in London last summer. Would it be imposing upon your kindness to ask you whether it was the beginning of a portrait, and would you feel inclined to carry it any further toward completion? It has some brilliant features that it seems a pity not to make something more of it”.Sargent replied on 23 April:“The sketch you sent me a photograph of was done in Broadway in England sometime in the 80s. I don’t think it would be possible to take it up again without destroying any tone or harmony that it may have – and what could one do but put some plates and things on the table? I think the sensible thing to do would be to cut off the lower part like this. It would diminish that vast foreground and leave all the upper part which alone is interesting”.

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John Singer SargentGuinevere – 1885

14.75 x 11.5 inches. Oils on canvas. Courtesy of Adelson Galleries.

Although the sitter for this lovely oil portrait is not known, the title (which is noted on an early list of works by Sargent) links it to the Arthurian legend of Camelot, the subject of numerous poems, plays, and novels. Although its existence has long been known, this painting has only recently come to light after spending much of the twentieth century in a private collection. Its literary subject, mood, and loose style suggest that Sargent painted it while on holiday at Broadway.

John Singer Sargent RA (1856 – 1925)

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents. His artistic leanings were fostered from an early age, receiving his first formal instruction in Rome at the age of 12. He attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence between 1870 and 1873. He was accepted into the studio of Emile-Augustus Carolus-Duran in Paris in 1874, studied at the École des Beaux Arts, and began to exhibit at the Paris Salon in 1877. Sargent’s portrait of his teacher exhibited in 1879 was met with great public approval and secured him many portrait commissions. It lead writer and art critic Henry James to write of him that he displayed “a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn”. It was at this time that Sargent met and painted with the Impressionists and made friends with Claude Monet whose style of plein air painting and interpretation of light was to become a great influence on his style of painting.

During the 1870s and 80s Sargent painted fashionably acceptable genre scenes. His travels introduced him to influences such as Velasquez, Franz Hals and James McNeil Whistler but it was his remarkable portraiture skills which made his budding reputation. In 1884 he exhibited a daring portrait of Madame Gautreau, the wife of a wealthy banker, at the

Paris Salon which caused a sensation as it was deemed provocatively erotic. In the ensuing scandal Sargent fled notoriety in Paris to London where lucrative commissions still awaited him. He ventured back to Paris in early 1885 but returned to England in July of that year encouraged by Henry James, whom he had met two years previously, who introduced him to leading figures in the artistic and theatrical world in London. At this stage Sargent’s self confidence was at an all-time low and he was considering abandoning a career in painting.

Among Sargent’s early friends was artist Edwin Austin Abbey and it was following a swimming accident with him at Pangbourne, where Sargent received a blow to the head, that he was encouraged to come to Broadway to recuperate. He stayed at the Lygon Arms whilst Abbey lived with his friend and fellow painter Frank Millet who had rented Farnham House for his family. Amongst the many visitors at this time were the writers Henry James and Edmund Gosse and painters Alfred Parsons and Frederick Barnard. The atmosphere was restorative and congenial, with painting and tennis by day and music, theatrical entertainment and revelry by night. Broadway provided the group with the rural idyll so sought after by the Americans at the time and in following years was to attract other artistic, literary, musical and theatrical geniuses such as Lawrence Alma Tadema, James Barrie, Evelyn Waugh, Edward Elgar and the famous American Actress Mary Anderson. It was during this holiday that Sargent started his great work Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose which he painted in the Impressionist style – entirely outdoors – for twenty minutes a day over the ensuing two years in order to achieve the incredible luminosity of the lanterns set against the background twilight.

In 1886 Sargent made London his permanent home but returned to Broadway for the summer when he stayed with Abbey and Millet who had by now rented Russell House, converting the adjoining barn into a studio. Millet also acquired the ruin of Abbot’s Grange which he restored for use as a studio. Several plein-air paintings and informal portraits of friends and their children were completed during this summer along with Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. The finished canvas was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1887 to unanimous acclaim and Sargent’s future was assured. With renewed confidence and a flattering critique in Harper’s New Monthly by Henry James preceding him, Sargent left for America in 1887 where he was overwhelmed with portrait commissions from wealthy society families.

Subsequently Sargent rented houses at Calcot Mill in Oxfordshire and the Rectory at Fladbury where he painted scenes evocative of Monet’s Seine paintings. It was his use of natural light and his blend of Impressionism and Realism in his portrait painting that was to win him recognition and election to the Royal Academy in 1893 and the Légion d’honneur in France. In 1890 Abbey bought Morgan Hall in Fairford and both Sargent and Henry James followed him there removing the major artistic driving force from Broadway.

For Sargent the 1890s were dominated by endless portrait commissions on both sides of the Atlantic and along with Edwin Abbey, the painting of murals for the Boston Public Library. For some considerable time Sargent was the world’s best-known and most highly paid portrait painter. Come the end of the decade Sargent announced his boredom with portrait painting and devoted his time to impressionist watercolour paintings depicting his travels throughout Europe as well as executing further murals at Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He died in London in 1925.

John Singer Sargent – Self PortraitAberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collections


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John Singer SargentIn the Orchard – 1886

24 x 29 inches. Oils on canvas. Private collection.

Thought to have been painted in the cherry orchard at Russell House, Broadway, rented by Frank Millet and Edwin Abbey in 1886 and in which Sargent took a share of the tenancy for the summer. The brushwork has been compared to that of his close friend Claude Monet.

John Singer SargentHouse and Garden, Nice – 1883/4

22 x 29 inches. Oils on canvas. Private collection. Painted a couple of years before Sargent first visited Broadway while he was living with his family in the south of France. The influence of his friends in the Impressionist movement can be clearly seen.


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John Singer SargentPolly Barnard – 1885/6

11 x 9.5 inches. Drawing on paper. ©Tate, London 2008

A study for one of the girls depicted in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

John Singer SargentDorothy Barnard – 1885/6

9.75 x 8.25 inches. Drawing on paper. ©Tate, London 2008

A study for one of the girls depicted in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose


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John Singer SargentA portrait of Violet – 1889

23.5 x 15 inches. Oils on canvas. Private collection.

Violet (1870 – 1955) was the artist’s younger sister, nineteen years of age at the time of this portrait. As neither Sargent or his other sister Emily married, it was the six children of Violet’s marriage to Francis Ormond who carried on the Sargent line.

John Singer SargentPortrait of Sir Charles Tennant – 1885/6


Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet (1823 – 1906) was a hugely successful business man, building upon a flourishing family chemicals business he was an initiator of Nobel’s Explosives Company Ltd. From his two marriages, the last at age seventy five, he fathered sixteen children, his daughters in particular well-known for their avant-garde behaviour. His daughter Margot was the second wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.


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John Singer SargentTwo figures in a boat, Isola Bella, Italy

13.75 x 18 inches. Watercolour over pencil. © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

In the early 1900s Sargent took to spending his summers sketching in mainland Europe with family and friends. The Val d’Aosta, the Simplon Pass, Lake Garda and Venice were favourite destinations. Many of Sargent’s drawings and watercolours of this period feature two of his favourite models, Dorothy and Polly Barnard. Daughters of the artists Frederick Barnard, they had posed for Sargent’s famous Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1886, Tate), and according to David McKibbin (in ‘Sargent’s Boston’, 1956), they ‘were often referred to by the artist as the “Intertwingles” for their easy exchange of poses. During Sargent’s summers sketching, the girls and sometimes their mother modelled for informal subjects like the ones shown here. Two figures in a boat, painted at Isola Bella in 1902, was given by Sargent to Polly and bears a dedication to her. All three works exhibited here were bequeathed by Dorothy Barnard to Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in 1949.

John Singer SargentSimplon - Mrs Barnard and daughter Dorothy

14 x 22.5 inches. Watercolour over pencil laid onto card. © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.


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John Singer SargentPortrait of Mrs Barnard and Miss Williams

19 x 14.5 inches. Pen and ink on paper. © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

John Singer SargentPortrait of Margot Asquith

21 x 14.5 inches. Charcoal. Private collection.

Margot Asquith (1864 – 1945), the eleventh child of Sir Charles Tennant, was most famously the second wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Vivacious, unconventional and charming, she was a friend and confidante of most of the major political figures of her time.

John Singer SargentPortrait of Mary

Black crayon on paper. 23 x 18 inches. Private collection.

‘Mary’ was Mary Anderson, the American actress who married Antonio de Navarro, the couple settling in Broadway following discovering the village when visiting Sargent, Millet, and the other artists and writers then based in Broadway.


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John Singer SargentDonkey


The label verso indicates that this work was purchased at the sale of the contents of Sargent’s studio, following his death in 1925. An unusual subject for Sargent, it has been suggested that it was painted as a result of a bet with Sir Alfred Munnings. During cleaning, it was discovered that the canvas had been stretched over another, thought to depict the garden at Fladbury Rectory. (see exhibit opposite)

John Singer SargentGarden at Fladbury Rectory


This work was discovered under the Study of a donkey during restoration.


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John Singer SargentPortrait of an Italian Model (Royal Academy school c. 1905)

Oils on canvas. 18 x 13 inches. Courtesy: John Noott Galleries.

When teaching at the Royal Academy Schools, circa 1905, Sargent, as was his wont, took a pupil’s canvas, turned it over, and quickly demonstrated how it SHOULD be done. The canvas has been turned on its stretcher, the pupil’s work is now visible on the reverse.

John Singer SargentThe Crucifix

20 x 19 inches. Bronze. Private collection.

A small version of the bronze exhibited by Sargent at the Royal Academy in 1901.The symbolism is complex, and depicts a Byzantine cross, with the figure of the dying Christ. Adam and Eve are crouched either side, each with a chalice to receive the Blood of Christ, and at the foot is a pelican, feeding its young with its own blood, an ancient symbol of the Resurrection. Below the feet of the Saviour is the serpent, signifying evil partially subdued.


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Francis Davis MilletBoys Fishing, Venice exhibited 1878


Francis Davis Millet 1846-1912

Francis Davis Millet was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. On leaving school he became a drummer-boy for the Union forces in the Civil War. He graduated with a degree in literature from Harvard in 1869. In 1871 he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.He returned to the USA in 1875 as a correspondent for the Advertiser at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He was commissioned to paint murals at the Trinity Church, Philadelphia with John LaFarge in 1876. During 1877-8 he was war correspondent for American and English newspapers in the Russian- Turkish War. In 1878 he was appointed as a member of the international art jury for the Paris Exposition.He married Elizabeth (Lily) Merrill the following year in Paris. Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Mark Twain were witnesses at their marriage. They had four children: Edwin (named after Edwin Abbey) who died in infancy, Kate, Laurence and John Alfred Parsons (named after Singer Sargent and Parsons). He subsequently exhibited both at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy, London. He was also a prolific writer of essays and short stories.The Millet family were persuaded to move to Broadway in 1885 by Laurence Hutton, a friend of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Accompanied by Millet’s sister Lucia they first rented Farnham House and then Russell House with Edwin Abbey. Frank Millet initially rented The Priory (Abbot’s Grange) as a studio and then acquired it and restored it in 1894. They entertained liberally forming the hub of an artistic and literary and musical colony in Broadway in the 1880s. It was during his summers at the Millet’s houses in 1885-6 that Singer Sargent painted his famous picture Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. As a fluent linguist he translated Tolstoy’s Sebastopol in 1887. He was appointed Director of Decorations at the Colombia Exposition, Chicago in 1893. 1898 saw his return to journalism as war correspondent in the Philippines.He died on the Titanic on April 14th 1912.

Accolades: Member of the Society of American ArtistsMember of the National Academy of Design, New YorkTrustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkSecretary of the American Academy at RomeMember of the Advisory Committee, National Gallery, London


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Francis Davis MilletPortrait of Lily Millet


Lily Millet was the artist’s wife.

Francis Davis MilletPortrait of Lady Lifford


A study for part of a major work which depicted Lord Lifford announcing, to an assembled crowd on Broadway’s village green, the accession to the throne of King Edward VII.


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Francis Davis MilletPortrait head (thought to be a study for the Noble Savage)

23 x 17 inches. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

By repute a study for one of Millet’s many murals.

Francis Davis MilletPortrait head, inscribed verso, dated 1872

17 x 13 inches. Inscribed verso. Private collection.

Inscribed verso and dated 1872, the artist was only twenty when this work was painted, exhibiting a precocious talent.


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Francis Davis MilletPortrait head

13 x 17. Oils on board. Private collection

Francis Davis MilletStudy of a lance, a saddle and other military accoutrements

15.5 x 5 inches. Pencil. Private collection

Possibly a study made when Millet was working as a war correspondent


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Phil MayMadame de Navarro

9.5 x 5 inches. Mixed media. Private collection

Madame de Navarro is clearly featured in the reproduction of the Phil May cartoon ‘A Quiet Village’ – see opposite.

Philip William May 1864-1903

Phil May was born in Leeds in 1864. His father, an engineer, died when he was 9 years old and Phil was forced to go out to work at a young age. He worked firstly as a timekeeper in a foundry and then as a jockey. Aged 16 he went to London seeking employment and suffered extreme poverty there, sleeping rough on the streets. Eventually he found work as a theatrical costumier.In 1885 he travelled to Australia to work for the Sydney Bulletin as illustrator and cartoonist. He returned to London in 1890 and was employed with Punch from 1892 producing political portraits. Punch produced annuals of his work from 1892 till 1904. Popular with his contemporaries, he was one of many artists who became one of the Broadway circle.May was a heavy drinker and his health had suffered from this and his early deprivation. He died in 1903 aged just 37 and weighing only 5 stone.

Phil MayBack Er Nellie Packer

7 x 3 inches. Pencil. Private collection

Phil MayNellie Packer ‘97

7 x 3 inches. Pencil. Private collection

These two sketches have survived locally, albeit in separate collections, being re-united for this exhibition for the first time for many decades. It is assumed that Nellie Packer was a Broadway character, clearly featuring in the reproduction of a Phil May cartoon, A Quiet Village, reproduced here.


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Fred BarnardPortrait of the Barnard children

28 x 36 inches. Oils on canvas. Private collection

A touching group portrait of the artist’s children, Polly and Dorothy, models for Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, with their brother Geoffrey, a promising artist who died in his early twenties. His father never recovered from his son’s death, dying himself at the age of fifty years.

Laura Alma-TademaOranges and Lemons

52 x 31 inches. Oils on canvas. Private collection

Sir Lawrence and Lady Laura Alma-Tadema, both extremely well-known artists, were great friends of Sargent, and frequent visitors to Broadway.

Frederick Barnard 1846-96

Frederick Barnard is best known for his illustrations of Charles Dicken’s characters and by his contributions to the Illustrated London News and Punch. He studied in Paris under Bonnat. In 1870 he married Alice Farraday and they had one son, Geoffrey and two daughters Polly and Dorothy. He was commissioned by Chapman and Hall to illustrate nine volumes of Dickens from 1871 to 1879.In 1885 Barnard moved to Broadway to join the colony and it was during the summers of 1885 and 1886 that John Singer Sargent used the two girls for his models in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Whilst in Broadway Barnard met Henry Harper of Harpers Monthy Magazine and subsequently was employed as a illustrator for this publication.In 1891 the Barnards’ son died suddenly and Frederick never recovered from this. His marriage fell apart and he separated from Alice in 1896 but remained active in his work, producing some of his finest pieces. He took to using narcotics and was prone to sleeplessness, but died tragically in a fire caused by falling asleep in bed whilst smoking a pipe.

Laura Alma-Tadema 1852-1909

Born Laura Theresa Epps, her two sisters, Emily and Ellen, were also painters and studied under John Brett (a Pre-Raphaelite) and Ford Maddox Brown. It was during a visit to the latter that Lawrence Alma-Tadema met the then seventeen year old Laura and fell in love. He had been recently widowed with two small daughters and was recuperating from a medical condition. The following year he moved to England to avoid the Franco-Prussian War and started instructing Laura in painting. They married in 1871, the marriage was childless but she became stepmother to Laurence and Anna and an accomplished artist in her own right.In 1873 Laura exhibited in the Paris International Exhibition, one of only two English women exhibitors. She subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery. She specialised in highly sentimental domestic and genre scenes of women and children in settings evocative of seventeenth century Dutch style. She was frequently painted by her husband, featuring in his classical scenes of life in ancient Greece and Rome.Laura’s brother-in-law Edmund Gosse, a renowned art critic, was a friend of Millet and Sargent and introduced the Alma-Tademas to the Broadway Colony in the 1880s. She died in Hindhead at the age of fifty seven. The grief-stricken Lawrence survived her less than three years.


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Paul César Helleu 1859-1927

Paul Helleu ws born in Vannes and trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris where he supported himself during his studies with an apprenticeship at a ceramist where his plate decorations established him as a gifted painter of womens’ portraits. He was on the verge of giving up his studies in 1878 due to lack of funds when Singer Sargent, on hearing of his plight gave him a thousand francs for one of his paintings. They remained life-long friends following this. Amongst their mutual friends in Paris were Monet, Degas, Renoir, Rodin, Tissot and Whistler.In 1883 Helleu and Sargent travelled together to the Netherlands to study Frans Hals. In 1884 Helleu painted and fell in love with the then 14 year old Alice Guérin whom he married two years later. They had two daughters, Ellen, in 1887 and Alice in 1896. His wife was the subject of endless studies and portraits.Helleu’s first of many visits to England was in 1885 when he developed a love of the country, adopting the fashionable “anglomania”. England was, at the time, a lucrative source of society portraits. By 1886 Helleu was a successful society portraitist in Paris and London. Marcel Proust held him in high regard and used him as a model for the artist Elstir in A la recherché du temps perdu.In 1889 Helleu and his family were frequent guests of Singer Sargent in his rented house in Calcot Mill, Oxfordshire, where he made many studies of Alice Helleu, and again in 1890 in Fladbury. Helleu continued to be the society darling of Europe in the 1890s and 1900s in France, England and New York adopting the air of a dandy. In 1898 his second child died accidentally and to divert the grief-stricken Alice he bought the first of a series of yachts harboured on the north coast of France. In 1912 he was commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Grand Central Station in New York.Shattered by the deaths of his good friends Proust in 1922 (whom he drew on his death bed) and Sargent in 1925 Helleu was weakened and died following a surgical operation in 1925.

Accolades:1904 Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur

Paul César HelleuMadame Helleu at Fladbury, chez John Singer Sargent, 1889

21.25 x 28.75 inches. Oils on canvas. Courtesy: Trinity House, Broadway.

Paul César Helleu was a great friend of Sargent, Helleu and his wife visiting frequently .This intimate study of the artist’s wife was painted in 1889, when visiting Sargent at Fladbury.


The next Broadway Arts Festival will take place in June 2012 and the theme will be the life and work of Alfred Parsons RA (1847 – 1920).

The Festival will feature a major retrospective exhibition of Parsons’ work together with garden visits, lectures and tours. Alongside his work will be

an exhibition of paintings by members of the Broadway Colony.

June 2012Alfred Parsons RA

and members of the Broadway Colony

Lugger’s Hill Gardens, Broadway

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Alfred ParsonsJapanese Paeonies

20.5 x 14 inches. Watercolours. Courtesy: John Noott Galleries, Broadway.

Alfred Parsons 1847-1920

Alfred Parsons was born in Beckington, Somerset and raised in London. After leaving school he became a post office clerk before studying at the Kensington School of Art.Parsons was introduced to Broadway by his friend Lawrence Dutton, a frequent visitor to Broadway Tower, the holiday retreat of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Rossetti. He was so taken with the village that he decided to make it his home and hence the colony was founded. Parsons had befriended Edwin Abbey whilst sharing studios in London and introduced him to Frank Millet and the Broadway colony. It was at Millet’s home that Parsons met Henry Harper, owner of Harper’s Illustrated News and Monthly Magazine and subsequently became an illustrator for this publication. He also illustrated books, songs and poems as well as travelogues. He collaborated with Edwin Austin Abbey on illustrations for She Stoops to Conquer and Herrick’s Poems and with Frank Millet’s The Danube, from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. He was recognised primarily for his flower and garden engravings and paintings. He was an avid horticulturalist and turned his skills to garden design and was a judge at Chelsea Flower Show.He settled in Broadway building Lugger’s Hill where he died on January 16th 1910.

Accolades:President of the Society of Painters in Watercolours 1905


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10 - 25 June 2010

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Documents

Friday 11 – Sunday 20 June 2010 - Broadway Arts Festivalbroadwayartsfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BAF_40pp_c… · Introduction by Richard Ormond CBE Broadway is writ