Originally commissioned as part of the major 2025 exhibition, Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter, produced in collaboration with the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, the work depicts Austen’s only character explicitly of African descent.
Described as a young, wealthy heiress, Miss Lambe had a ‘maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was always of the first consequence in every plan’. The character’s great fortune tempts unscrupulous characters to imagine acquiring her wealth through marriage. Despite this, Miss Lambe’s story remains untold due to Austen’s premature death in 1817.
As part of her creative residency at Harewood in response to Austen & Turner and the handwritten manuscript of Sanditon (on loan from King’s College Cambridge), Harris was keen to explore Miss Lambe’s untold narrative through the medium of portraiture.
Working through collage gave me a way to imagine the life Austen only begins to sketch out in her unfinished novel Sanditon. By bringing together fragments from different centuries, I imagined Miss Lambe not just as a fictional character, but as a real young mixed-heritage woman moving through Harewood with all the complexity, vulnerability and resilience that would have entailed in the early nineteenth century. The final charcoal portrait became a way of holding together fact, speculation and feeling. I used Austen's descriptions of Miss Lambe as 'precious', 'chilly' and 'tender' as an anchor, while allowing the gaps in her story to remain visible. Through this approach, I wanted to centre a presence where the historical record so often falls silent.”
Lela Harris - Contemporary Artist
Harris’ portrait of Miss Lambe remains deliberately incomplete, echoing the unfinished nature of Sanditon as well as the historic erasure of Black women from archival spaces. Like the portrait’s picture surface, pieced together using stationery from Harewood’s collection, Harris fills these gaps, weaving together fact, fiction and historical imagination.
Following Miss Lambe’s huge popularity with visitors during the Austen & Turner exhibition – even inspiring her own fan art – the portrait returns to display in the Music Room at Harewood, alongside four of Harris’ preparatory collages, where the works will remain for the 2026 season and beyond.
I'm truly honoured that my portrait of Miss Lambe has found a permanent home at Harewood. The work began as an act of imagining a presence that history only hints at, so for it to now become part of the house's collection feels especially meaningful. I hope it encourages conversations about the lives that have shaped places like Harewood and reminds us that there are always stories waiting to be seen, questioned and reimagined.”
Lela Harris - Contemporary Artist
A priority of Harewood’s collecting practice today is to redress the historic lack of diversity within its portraiture collection through new acquisitions and initiatives such as its Missing Portraits series. This has most recently involved the commissioning of a new portrait of the British actor and writer, David Harewood OBE, whose ancestors were enslaved by the Lascelles family.
By increasing opportunities to tell Black History narratives through its permanent collection, Harewood hopes to better represent the communities and histories integral to its foundation and better engage audiences with its challenging past. As well as inspiring meaningful conversations with visitors within the House, the acquisition of Miss Lambe will be felt across Harewood, from its award-winning learning programme to staff and volunteer development.
We are incredibly excited to acquire Lela Harris’ portrait of Miss Lambe into Harewood’s permanent collection following its hugely popular debut during our 2025 exhibition, Austen & Turner. The acquisition represents an important addition to Harewood’s collection, becoming its first formal portrait of a Black woman. Whilst the sitter is fictional, Austen’s character – a free Black heiress - stands to enrich our understanding of the Black presence in both Regency Britain and the British Country House. Through her portrait of Miss Lambe, Harris makes visible this community and challenges perceptions of the Black female experience during this historical period.”
Rebecca Burton - Curator and Archivist at Harewood
Lela’s magnificent portrait of Jane Austen’s most enigmatic character comes back to Harewood at a significant moment as we take stock of Austen’s enduring legacies following the 250th anniversary of her birth. Increasingly, our sense of those legacies have been enriched and complicated by a deepening understanding of what Austen’s novels reveal or conceal about the world in which she lived. Lela’s stunning portrait of Miss Lambe makes an important intervention into this continuing conversation by quite literally surfacing the complex and brutal colonial foundations of Jane Austen’s world.”
Professor Jennie Batchelor - Head and Professor of English at the University of York and co-curator of the Austen & Turner exhibition
Art Fund
V&A, National Lottery and Arts Council
Purchased with the generous support of the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Art Fund, the portrait joins Harewood’s outstanding collection of British portraiture containing works by some of leading portrait artists from the 18th century to today, from Joshua Reyolds and Thomas Gainsborough to Alfred Munnings and John Singer Sargent.