Major exhibition for 2025: Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter

Celebrating the 250th anniversary since their shared birth year with new narratives, ‘Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter’ is curated by Harewood House Trust in collaboration with The Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. Harewood House, located just north of Leeds, is a classic example of an 18th century Palladian country house. It was built by Edwin Lascelles, using profits from the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people and associated industries.

Neither Jane Austen nor JMW Turner were from aristocratic backgrounds but they both had privileged access to this world, whether as invited guests, tourists or through family connections. Turner’s paintings of Harewood remain some of the most iconic works in Harewood’s collection. As a young, aspiring artist at the very start of his career, he was invited by the Lascelles family to paint the House and its landscape, producing nine paintings of the house, castle and surrounding landscapes.

Harewood provided the springboard for one of the most important sketching trips of Turner’s career, where he discovered his love of landscape and began to push the boundaries of watercolour painting. Austen knew of the Lascelles family at Harewood, suggestively naming a character after them in ‘Mansfield Park’ (1814), a novel that explores empire and slavery as key themes.

The exhibition will highlight Austen’s and Turner’s work within their colonial contexts, attending to the entanglement of the British country house with global histories. Harewood’s colonial connections will be addressed alongside artwork and literature from a selected contemporary artist and a writer-in-residence. Turner’s paintings of Harewood and Harewood’s first edition copy of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (1811) will be presented alongside rarely seen artworks and loans from public and private collections.

The period in which Austen and Turner were active was fraught with political and social change, from the French Revolution to the Napoleonic wars, the abolitionist movement and the Peterloo Massacre. These seismic events shaped the everyday lives of Britons and energised the nation’s artists, writers, and thinkers. The Romantic period saw numerous creative responses and contributions to the understanding of individualism, human rights, and emotion, alongside advances in medicine and science.

Austen’s and Turner’s role as innovators within their respective fields will be acknowledged. Turner’s stylistic progress will be illustrated by a range of works spanning his career and paralleled with Austen’s pioneering, and at times experimental, literary technique that allowed vivid and intimate insight into the minds and emotions of her characters. The result of these approaches not only secured Austen’s and Turner’s artistic immortality within the Western canon but produced creative legacies that continue to influence the reception and perception of the British country house and its landscapes today.

Austen and Turner is a significant collaborative exhibition and research project between Harewood House Trust in partnership with academics and postgraduate researchers from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, as well as independent curatorial consultant, Jade Foster. The exhibition aims to generate new understandings and original, interdisciplinary scholarship on the work of Austen, Turner and the Harewood collection.

Rebecca Burton, Curator and Archivist, Harewood House Trust said: “The joint 250th anniversaries of these legendary artistic figures present an irresistible opportunity to celebrate and explore Austen’s and Turner’s interpretations of the British country house in tandem. People tend to associate Turner with landscapes and Austen with society but we want to challenge that. We’re bringing together a remarkable group of artworks, objects, and manuscripts to draw out new and surprising narratives around their work, exploring how their artistic legacies have framed our understanding of the British country house – its people, interiors and landscapes. There has never been a better time to compare and contrast Austen’s and Turner’s creative legacies.”

Professor Chloe Wigston Smith, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York said: “We are delighted to be working with Harewood House Trust on this exciting exhibition. Austen and Turner captures the collaborative and creative spirit of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at York by bringing academics, students and the public together in a shared conversation inspired by Harewood’s spectacular collections.”

Harewood will present an Austen and Turner festival of events throughout the year to accompany the exhibition, including Pride and Prejudice outdoor theatre, extravagant balls and afternoon teas. Turner-inspired artist-led painting workshops will be held in the ‘Capability’ Brown landscape, and a film festival of Austen-inspired classics – some of which were filmed at Harewood, plus children’s arts and outdoor painting activities.