Regency playdate

Exactly 250 years ago, England saw the birth of a great artist whose innovations forever changed our culture.

I speak, of course, of the painter J.M.W. Turner.

Yes, amid the hoopla over Jane Austen’s semiquincentennial, you may have overlooked the opportunity to celebrate the same milestone for a prolific painter whose extraordinary landscapes embodied Romanticism and anticipated Impressionism.

Luckily, however, the folks at Harewood House, a spectacular eighteenth-century mansion in Yorkshire, are on the case—and they’ve found a way to honor both Turner and Austen at the same time. Harewood’s new exhibit, “Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter,” opens tomorrow and runs through October 19.

The exhibit includes the manuscript of Sanditon, the novel Austen left unfinished at her death, as well as a first edition of Sense and Sensibility, plus other Austen family papers. The Turner artifacts on display include the sketchbook and watercolor set he used during a well-documented 1797 visit to Harewood.

The “encounter” of the exhibit’s title is purely conceptual, however: Despite the coincidence of birth year, the two Regency-born geniuses never met, and Austen never visited Harewood. Although Turner was just eight months older than Austen, he was born in London to a lower-middle-class family (father a barber, uncle a butcher), so playdates with Austen's better-educated, socially superior clan were never going to happen.

But those inconvenient facts haven’t stopped the curators. “We imagine an encounter between these iconic figures, whose innovative works recorded the Regency era,” the exhibit website explains. “Through Austen’s and Turner’s eyes, the show explores the world of the country house in their time and their impact on how we think about stately homes today.”

At first blush, including Sanditon in an exhibit about the country house seems an odd choice, since the story takes place at a seaside resort, with nary a Pemberley or Mansfield Park in sight. But Sanditon is also the only Austen novel to include a character of color—Miss Lambe, the biracial West Indian heiress—and Harewood was built with money earned from Caribbean sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. The juxtaposition highlights the unsavory economic underpinnings of Austen’s world; Edward Said would approve.

Harewood is also programming a number of Regency-themed events throughout the six months of the exhibition—a costumed ball, a candlelit concert of period music, and--my personal favorite--“Sensory and Sensibility,” an hour-long affair aimed at the under-age-four set. “Through interactive storytelling, sensory play, and gentle music, your baby will explore the elegance and charm of Regency England,” the website promises.

As we Janeites say, it’s never too early to introduce the little ones to Jane Austen. Or to J.M.W. Turner, I guess.