We are writing to let you know about a major new exhibition, Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter at Harewood House from 2 May to 19 October to celebrate the 250th anniversaries of these two cultural icons.
The exhibition and associated research project is a collaboration between Harewood House Trust and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CECS) at the University of York and co-curated by Prof Chloe Wigston Smith (Director of CECS), Professor Jennie Batchelor (Head of English, York), Dr Richard Johns (History of Art, York) and Dr Marjorie Coughlan (History of Art, York), with Rebecca Burton (Harewood House Trust Curator and Archivist) and curatorial support from independent curators Jade Foster and Diane Howse.
In the 250th anniversary of their births, Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter explores a shared world, literature, art and creative innovation.
Austen and Turner are not known to have met, although their lives intersected in tantalising ways. This exhibition brings them into conversation with each other and with a third actor that played such an important part of their lives, their works: the country house and its complex entanglements with the national and global politics, including the extreme violence of the traffic in enslaved people.Highlights of the exhibition include stunning Turner country house portraits, landscapes and interiors and his own watercolour set. Austen’s letters and first editions of her novels are on show alongside part of the manuscript of ‘Sanditon’ on which Austen was working prior to her untimely death in 1817.
We have been fortunate to work with the exhibition’s Writer in Residence, Dr Rommi Smith, and Artist in Residence, Lela Harris, who have been commissioned to produce new work for the exhibition inspired by Austen and Turner and which will also be on display.
The exhibition is open daily from 10:30-4.00. It is FREE to Harewood members and included with day tickets. To book tickets in advance, please use this link.
Please share widely. A digital poster is attached.
Best wishes
Jennie Batchelor, Chloe Wigston Smith, Richard Johns and Marjorie Coughlan.