The parallel lives of Jane Austen and JMW Turner
250 years after the births of Jane Austen and JMW Turner, a show at Harewood House explores their life and times in the context of the country house.
A version of this article first appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
In an unassuming sketch from 1827 – belonging to a group of watercolours that the artist JMW Turner made during a visit to Petworth, the Sussex estate owned by George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont – are two figures. On the left, a man stands, his hands in his pockets, his head and body angled towards a woman to his right, as if in mid-conversation. She sits on a chair, her back towards us, her head turned slightly to the right. Is she listening to him? Perhaps she hears him but isn’t interested in what he has to say. Are they exchanging polite words about the weather, or are they engaged in a more intimate conversation?
This work offers a rare glimpse into the elite social life of the English country house in the early 19th century: two family members or guests sharing a private moment. The unidentified figures could also be characters from one of Jane Austen’s novels, observed during an awkward first encounter, perhaps, or in a revelatory moment of mutual affection. Could it even be Austen and Turner themselves? As far as we know, these two icons of literature and art never met, but their work undoubtedly found common ground in the imaginations of readers and exhibition visitors.
Early lives
Turner (1775-1851) grew up amid the commercial hubbub of London, the son of a Covent Garden barber. His artistic ability and aspirations became apparent at an early age, and he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools when he was 14. Throughout his adult life, he travelled widely, first within the British Isles, and, when circumstances allowed, across the Continent. During an early tour to the north of England in the summer of 1797, he established a lasting network of patrons in Yorkshire, including Edward, Viscount Lascelles, son of the 1st Earl of Harewood, who commissioned six large watercolour views of Harewood House and Harewood Castle. Within a few years, professional success and recognition brought financial rewards that far exceeded his relatively humble origins.
Austen (1775-1817) and her family were of a higher social standing than Turner, but she set her novels in a genteel world to which she had limited access. She spent the first 25 years of her life at the relatively modest Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, where her father was rector. After his death, Austen remained financially reliant upon her brothers for the rest of her life. When she visited country houses, she did so as a dependent relative. She made regular visits to Godmersham Park in Kent, one of three estates belonging to her brother Edward Austen Knight. At Godmersham, Austen took advantage of a well-stocked library, but she was also expected to earn her keep by entertaining her nieces and nephews.
Despite their different experiences, Austen and Turner came of age in the same shifting Regency world, and their formative years were shaped by the same global forces. Revolution, first in the British colonies in North America, then in France, gave rise to the uncertainties of a protracted world war. News of conflict abroad and the spectacle of uniformed soldiers and sailors at home were everyday matters. Theirs was also a nation built on the extreme violence and doublethink of the slave trade.
Austen died at the age of 41, Turner 34 years later in his mid-70s. In the long years since, the reputation of both has continued to grow and evolve as successive generations of readers and viewers have discovered and been captivated by their work. Austen’s literary legacy is a worldwide phenomenon, shared through translations of her novels and numerous adaptations for film and television. Equally, the modern reach of Turner’s work seems limitless. Exhibited in museums across the world, his art continues to inspire in new and unexpected ways. And we carry them both in our pockets on our banknotes, as well as in our imaginations.
All of these confluences come into sharp focus via the rich and contradictory culture of the social microcosm of the English country house. Austen and Turner, like no other authors or artists before or since, positioned themselves as acute and critical observers of that complex and changing environment. It is fitting that Harewood and the country-house culture it exemplifies should become a third actor in this drama of Austen and Turner. The exhibition ‘Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter’ (supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund) explores this shared world of literature and art. In doing so, it opens a space for creative speculation. If Austen and Turner had met, what would they have said to, or shared with, one another?
Constructing the picturesque
Four thematic threads interweave throughout the exhibition of artworks and artefacts, connecting Austen and Turner to the world in which their work found meaning, the first of which is the picturesque landscape. The picturesque was a hot topic in Austen and Turner’s age. For an artist, constructing such a landscape involved setting the frame, balancing the fore-, middle- and backgrounds and showing nothing obviously manicured. And artists well understood the potency of carefully placed indicators of wealth and social standing. The watercolour views of Harewood that Turner made for Edward, Viscount Lascelles represent the family’s ownership and control of the land. The landscape is enlivened with people: workers keeping the estate productive, and others of higher status at leisure, some of whom pause during a walk to admire the view and invite us to do the same. The poverty of rural life experienced by so many remains out of view.
Novels of the period were also shaped by the language of the picturesque aesthetic. Henry Austen tells us his sister Jane ‘was a warm and judicious admirer of landscape’. All of her novels bear the influence of the picturesque, especially in their descriptions of houses and estates. But, arguably, it was the sense of cultivated perspective that Austen found most compelling. Like Turner, Austen was an innovator and found in the picturesque a proposition she espoused in prose: a desire to look at things differently to reveal the world anew.
Sociability and the country house
The second theme is that of sociability. The era in which Austen and Turner lived is often described as a time when polite conversation, pleasing manners and easy relations between people carried a new social importance. It was also a reaction against the rigid standards of an earlier age. This dramatic social shift had brought new opportunities for social exchange: coffee houses, art exhibitions, museums, assembly rooms and bright, airy shops. These venues required new modes of interaction, where listening, responding and engaging with conversational partners could be taken as a measure of respectability.
As a regular artist-guest at Harewood, Farnley Hall, Petworth and other country houses, Turner trained his eye not only on the architecture and surrounding landscape, but also on the people who inhabited it. He would never become (nor did he desire to be) the social equal of his aristocratic employers and, according to those who knew him, his manners always came with a rough edge. Nevertheless, Turner’s artistic prowess and generous sociability gave him entry into the private world of his patrons.
Like Turner, Austen was a visitor to, rather than a resident of, country houses. Her novels deliciously exploit the comedy and drama of sociability, often revealing the potential of both to pulse through a single setting or conversation. Her male characters such as Mr Darcy show so much restraint in their politeness that they appear uninterested in a beloved heroine, while others, such as Sense and Sensibility’s John Willoughby, show insufficient restraint and reveal themselves to be predators. Meanwhile, heroines from Fanny Price to Elizabeth Bennet often find themselves embroiled in painful conversations, forced to listen to information that is unpleasant or unbearably awkward. In Austen’s hands, the age of sociability is an opportunity to shine a light on those who speak with care, and those who still have lessons to learn about how to express themselves in the world.
Ties to slavery
Georgian Britain was built on the profits of empire and slavery, and the exhibition’s third theme explores this in relation to the country house. The 18th and early- 19th centuries are known for the extensive building of new mansions and country houses, including Harewood in the 1760s, in the fashionable Palladian style. The furnishing of these spaces with Chippendale furniture, gilded mirrors and galleries of fine paintings communicated the cultural values of the families who inhabited them. This cultural capital depended on human capital, including the 3.5 million Africans who were trafficked by the British and forced to toil as enslaved labourers on British-owned plantations between 1662 and 1838.
The Lascelles family of Harewood were one of many British families and institutions who profited from slavery, investing both in the trade of enslaved people and in sugar plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada and Tobago. It was the labour of enslaved people over several generations that sustained Harewood, and that still defines the experience of the house, from the silverware in the dining room to the mahogany used in the construction of its doors and other fixtures. Today, Harewood House Trust and the Lascelles family are committed to acknowledging Harewood’s past and engaging with the legacies of transatlantic slavery in 21st-century Britain.
Neither Austen nor Turner could have remained unaware of the effects of slavery on those living under its yoke, or of its presence in their everyday lives, from sugar at the tea table to cotton in their clothes. Both Austen and Turner held family and personal connections to slavery on the one hand and the abolitionist movement on the other. This was typical of thousands of Britons at the time. Turner profited from personal investments that depended on forced labour in Jamaica, while also lending his support to campaigns to end slavery.
The Austen family’s ties to slavery are similarly complex. The author’s extended family, including the Leigh Perrots, had investments in Caribbean plantations, and Austen’s father was connected, somewhat ambiguously, as a trustee to an Antiguan sugar plantation. But what of Austen herself? Mansfield Park, home of the Bertrams, is built on the profits of enslaved labour. When Fanny Price asks her uncle about the ‘slave-trade’ she is met with a silence that has troubled many readers, not least because it is difficult to reconcile it to what we know of the novel’s author: Austen’s favourite poet was the abolitionist William Cowper.
Lastly, there’s the theme of creative innovation. Austen and Turner have long been recognised and reimagined by successive generations as cultural icons who fundamentally changed how we see the world. But why do we keep returning to Austen’s captivating storytelling and Turner’s compelling landscapes? Unusually, a vast amount of Turner’s private and preparatory work survives as part of the Turner Bequest at Tate. This remarkable collection, alongside other examples, illuminates his working methods, revealing a tireless commitment to the tools of his trade. A voracious reader throughout her life and an author from her teenage years, Austen experimented with different tones and forms and honed her craft over decades. As with Turner’s mesmerising views, Austen’s creative play with perspective allows us to see what we could not before, to see through and with someone else’s eyes.
This is an edited extract from the ‘Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter’ catalogue text by Jennie Batchelor, Richard Johns, Chloe Wigston Smith and Marjorie Coughlan at University of York and Rebecca Burton, curator and archivist at Harewood House Trust. Edited by Helen Sumpter.
Visiting list
‘Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter’, Harewood House, Leeds, to 19 October. 50% off entry and exhibitions with National Art Pass.
‘Turner: In Light and Shade’, the Whitworth, Manchester, to 2 November. Free to all, 10% off in shop with National Art Pass.
Jane Austen’s House, Chawton Emma Festival, 12 to 20 July; Persuasion & Poetry Festival, 12 to 21 September. 50% off entry with National Art Pass.
‘Impressions in Watercolour: Turner and His Contemporaries’, the Holburne Museum, Bath, to 14 September. 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass.
‘Jane Austen: Down to the Sea’, Dorset Museum & Art Gallery, Dorchester, 14 June to 14 September. Free entry with National Art Pass.
‘Turner: Always Contemporary’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 25 October to 22 February 2026. 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass.
‘Beyond the Bonnets: Working Women in Jane Austen’s Novels’, Willis Museum and Sainsbury Gallery, Basingstoke, 12 November to 22 February 2026. Free to all.
'Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts', Turner's House, Twickenham, to 26 October. 50% off exhibitions with National Art Pass.