Lady Fishing, by the American artist John Singer Sargent. 1889. This leisurely image of English country life provides a direct contrast with the dramatic scenes of the industrial Midlands. The move towards a simpler, more natural lifestyle based on medieval values was led by the designer and writer William Morris. His move to Kelmscott Manor in the Cotswolds in 1871 led to an exodus of artists, designers, writers and idealists from the cities to the Cotswolds. The image of the Cotswolds as a rural paradise was born – an image it has retained to this day.

Richard Humphreys:

The John Singer Sargent picture of the lady fishing is of a friend, Mrs Ormond. You can see that the fishing rod hasn't actually been painted that clearly. On the river at Fladbury at the time the Cotswolds had been discovered by Morris and it was through a friend of Morris that people like Sargent and other wealthy Americans, Henry James is another, became obsessed with this as the very living image of the true heart of England, you know the countryside of England at its purest. Although typically until the 1920s probably most of the people who were moving to the Cotswolds were arts and crafts people going there for the ideal life that William Morris had proposed in 'News from Nowhere'.

Narrator:

Morris's hugely influential novel, News from Nowhere, is displayed nearby, in a case on the left as you enter the Cotswolds' section.

David Dimbleby:

News from Nowhere was William Morris's vision of what would happen if his ideal world came about; if industry on a massive scale came to an end and people went back to having a personal, private relationship with the land and with their work and the things...Like a kind of benign, idealised communism that he believed in. It's about a hundred years from now and he describes Manchester as having vanished and London being half grassed-over. It's a wonderful description! And he saw the Cotswolds as a countryside that would be filled with happy, working people weaving and making things by hand. All the things that he did and all the things that he was expert at. Designing original things but basically not mass producing and making them themselves. And of course now the Cotswolds - I think he'd be very surprised - are full of rather successful people's weekend cottages. It's completely the opposite of what he'd expect in the Cotswolds.