Her green and pleasant land

Peggy Guggenheim, doyenne of avant-garde art, once lived at a Hampshire cottage in the woods. Mary Miers traces a rare domestic time in the American heiress’s life

- Mary Miers

THREE miles south of Petersfield, on the boundary of Hampshire and Sussex, stands a 2,000-year-old yew tree, one of the largest in a domestic setting. For centuries, it has shaded the former Yew Tree Cottage, now Hurstfield House, a picturesque patchwork of timber frame ranges dating from the 15th century.

It’s difficult to imagine an occupant less likely for this unpretentious dwelling than the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim (1898– 1979), doyenne of avant-garde art. Yet, in 1934, she bought it for £1,850 and immersed herself in the one truly domestic phase of her unconventional life. With its low beams, smallpaned windows and inglenook fireplace, the cottage was a far cry from the Parisian apartments, Manhattan duplexes and Venetian palazzi that were her customary abodes, but Peggy shipped over her Venetian furniture from Paris, ordered sheepskin rugs from Suffolk and settled into English rural life. A particular attraction was the setting: ‘The whole countryside seemed to be a part of it. It was at the foot of the downs, but we were actually in a valley and we had a stream running through our garden, which was all sloping,’ she wrote. She loved the woods ‘filled with wild garlic and later with bluebells, campion and irises… the heavenly cry of the cuckoo and at night there were nightingales’.

Peggy’s five years at Yew Tree Cottage marked a turning point in her life. She arrived desolate from the recent death of her greatest love, John Holms, still searching for some direction and hoping perhaps to find catharsis through her new liaison with Douglas Garman, a Marxist publisher and poet. Brought up in New York among the Jewish haute bourgeoisie, she’d experienced early unhappiness and the tragic deaths of her father and sister.