History is full of odd couples: famous but unrelated people who happen to have been born in the same year. 1809: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. 1926: Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe. Yet few historical pairings are as unlikely as the novelist Jane Austen and the painter J.M.W. Turner, born within a few months of each other in 1775.
Usually the only time these two cultural icons encounter one another is in our purses or wallets: Turner depicted as a dashing young Romantic on the £20 note, Austen looking demure and doe-eyed (a heavily airbrushed version of the portrait originally sketched by her sister Cassandra) on the £10 note. Otherwise they might appear to have little in common. Turner painted large-scale canvases that were full of visual drama and danger; Austen joked that her intimate domestic scenes were written on a ‘little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory’. Turner lived with his lover and dabbled in erotic drawings; Austen lived with her mother and told Cassandra: ‘You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.’ Turner displayed his paintings in a London gallery built to his own specifications; Austen wrote in a house with a creaking door that allowed her to hide her work under a piece of blotting paper whenever she heard someone coming.
Yet although they probably never met, a new exhibition that opened earlier this month in Harewood House – the Yorkshire stately home where the 2019 film Downton Abbey was shot – aims to put them in conversation with each other. It’s where Turner was commissioned in 1797 to produce a set of watercolours showing Viscount Lascelles’s grand new house with grounds laid out by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, like a Regency version of boastful Instagram posts.
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