Broadway Arts Festival is the leading arts festival in The Cotswolds.

The beautiful Cotswold village of Broadway is a centre for the arts with a unique artistic heritage of a world-famous colony of American artists, writers and musicians, who visited and worked here in the late 19th century.

The next Broadway Arts Festival will take place from 6th to 15th June 2025

However there are plenty of events before then and tickets are now on sale at broadwayartsfestival.com/events/

The biennial festival offers a hugely varied schedule of events that include celebrity talks, workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions, music, and theatre of the highest quality for all ages to inspire, encourage and entertain anyone with an interest in the arts.

Celebrating Broadway's artistic heritage and the Arts in Broadway since 1885.

In the painting 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ the children lighting lanterns are Dolly and Polly Barnard. John Singer Sargent was friends with their father, illustrator Frederick Barnard. Sargent painted it in a garden in Broadway, a village in south-west England where Sargent stayed in the summer of 1885. Sargent wanted to paint from real life. There were only a few minutes each evening where the light was right. He would place his easel and paints, pose the models beforehand, and wait for the right moment to start. As summer ended and the flowers died, he replaced them with pot plants.
Gallery label Tate Britain May 2023.

In the 1880s Francis Davis Millet was a member of the Broadway Colony of Artists - an Anglo-American group including Alfred Parsons, Edwin Abbey & John Singer Sargent, keen to escape the squalor or the Industrial Revolution and seek old English rural tradition. Frank Millet rented Farnham House and then purchased Russell House. John Singer Sargent paid his first visit to Broadway in September 1885 and it was in the summers of 1885 and 1886 that Sargent painted 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' in the gardens of Farnham House and Russell House. Frank Millet acquired Abbots Grange in the late 1800s, at that time a deteriorated 14th century priory, which he converted into studios. Millet gradually restored Abbotts Grange with advice from William Morris. His finest work ‘Between two fires’ was painted in The Great Hall at Abbots Grange. The painting is now housed at the Tate Gallery in London.