Illustrating Austen and other exhibitions at The Holburne Museum, Bath
Details
Join us for a look around the exhibitions: Illustrating Austen; Powder and Presence: Pastel Portraits in the Eighteenth Century; Dreams of the everyday: paintings by Winifred Nicholson & Andrew Cranston.
We will then go for a coffee and cake at the museum cafe.
Tickets are here: https://holburne.org/
Standard adult tickets are £16.50, but with an Art Fund pass they are only £8.
From the website:
"In the 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth, the Holburne is delighted to present Illustrating Austen, a chance for audiences to see the artwork behind their favourite Austen novels.
Centring around Austen’s stories and the characters she created, Illustrating Austen demonstrates how our favourite characters came to life on the page, how different artists depicted them in a range of styles, and how they have evolved through the years, reflecting changing times and new audiences.
Austen resided just across the road from the Holburne Museum at 4 Sydney Place (from 1801-1804), and Bath had a profound effect on her work, particularly in her social commentary on the city in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. It was not until after her death in 1817 that interest in her work truly began to grow, and not until 1894 that the first complete illustrated edition of a Jane Austen novel was published, the famous ‘Peacock Edition’ of Pride and Prejudice by Hugh Thomson. From this point onward, Austen’s characters came to live visually on the page, and with each new illustrated edition of Austen’s work, her characters were interpreted differently, reflecting the styles of the artists who brought them to life and the time period in which the edition was produced.
This concise exhibition features illustrations, illustrated editions, original sketchbooks, printing blocks, and complete works, now considered works of art in their own right. It brings together, for the first time, some of the earliest illustrations of familiar characters with their modern iterations, taking us on a journey from the nineteenth century through to the current work of Coralie Bickford-Smith for Penguin cloth-bound classics."
Further details on the other exhibitions here: https://holburne.org/planning-your-visit/whats-on/