A country house encounter

Marking 250 years of Jane Austen and JMW Turner, Harewood House Trust is bringing the artists together for the first time in Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter, a landmark exhibition exploring the social and cultural life of the British country house and its landscape.

The exhibition will feature significant loans from national collections with support from the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, allowing visitors to encounter rarely seen manuscripts, works of art and objects that illuminate the creative legacies of Austen and Turner.

Created by Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first UK-wide funding scheme to enable regional museums to borrow important works of art and artefacts from national collections, expanding public access to world-class culture.

Extraordinary works on display

Katie Lloyd (KL): Can you tell us a bit about the most significant works that will be going on display?

Rebecca Burton (RB): This exhibition brings together a remarkable series of loans that allows visitors to explore the country house through Austen’s and Turner’s eyes. The works help us gain insight into their perceptive observations, and we also go ‘behind the scenes’, showing their creative interpretations and processes.

Highlight loans include the handwritten Austen manuscript of Sanditon – complete with her crossing outs and corrections – as well as two letters, plus sketchbooks and manuscripts by several members of Austen’s family.

On the Turner side, rarely seen sketches, his North of England sketchbook and studies reveal the artist’s surprising interest in the social life of the country house, in addition to large-scale works that demonstrate his technical ability and innovation.  

KL: Turner’s North of England sketchbook and his handmade travelling watercolour are on loan from Tate and the Royal Academy respectively. What do they reveal about Turner’s artistic process and his early engagement with Harewood House?

RB: Uniting two of Turner’s personal artistic tools – a sketchbook and a paint set – with finished watercolours in the Harewood collection offers a unique opportunity for visitors to see the artist’s picture-making process in a site-specific way.

In the context of Harewood, these tools demonstrate that the artist’s practice was rooted in the landscape itself – the sketchbook documenting Turner’s physical journey through the Harewood estate. The paint set represents his innovative approach to the newly accessible medium of watercolour, designed to be used outdoors and on the move.

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Travelling watercolour box owned by JMW Turner, Royal Academy ca. 1842. Photo: ©Royal Academy of Arts, London

KL: The manuscript for Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon is on loan from King’s College, Cambridge, alongside letters and family possessions. What unexpected narratives do these items reveal?

RB: These loans offer a compelling opportunity to explore Austen’s work in its full global context. For instance, works by Austen’s brothers – who were both admirals in the British Navy – emphasise Austen’s position as a wartime novelist, whose writing played out against the background of colonial conflict.

Themes of empire are also explored in Austen’s final, unfinished novel Sanditon, which is unique in its inclusion of a character explicitly of African descent – Miss Lambe, a wealthy young heiress from the Caribbean – whose presence enriches our understanding of the Black presence in Regency Britain.

KL: Harewood House focuses strongly on engaging new and underrepresented audiences. What is the wider impact of the Weston Loan Programme on your ability to tell more inclusive stories about its history and collections, and how will it help to attract new audiences?

RB: Inspired by two nationally significant anniversaries, the exhibition has enabled us to reframe the work of Austen and Turner in the context of Harewood’s collection, in turn allowing us to foreground narratives that address its creative but also colonial histories in new ways.

For instance, we’ve commissioned two new contemporary works by artist Lela Harris and writer Rommi Smith that explore the creative legacies of Austen and Turner, ensuring that their work continues to inspire and remain relevant to a diverse, 21st-century audience.

KL: This exhibition is a first for Harewood in terms of borrowing from multiple major institutions, including Tate, the British Library and Jane Austen’s House. What has this process meant for Harewood’s future ambitions in lending and borrowing?

RB: It has opened a world of possibilities for us in terms of bringing nationally significant loans to Yorkshire in the future. The process has enabled us to make essential improvements to display infrastructure in the House and build skills and confidence in the team to facilitate lending on a similar scale in years to come.

This aligns with the trust’s ambition to deliver an artistic and cultural programme with national scale and impact. The loans process has also generated new avenues for research and knowledge sharing between our lending partners, paving the way for future collaborations and lending opportunities.  

‘Austen and Turner’ is curated by Harewood House Trust in collaboration with the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York and independent curatorial consultant Jade Foster.

‘Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter’ is at Harewood House from Friday 2 May to Sunday 19 October 2025. More information here.