‘It was such a pleasure to me to sit out in the open garden and paint.’
From Saturday 1 February until 14 March, there will be an exhibition on some of my work on Mary Severn Newton on the 3rd floor of Senate House, University of London. It is outside the Hellenic and Roman Library - just as you come out of the lifts. Ann Mary Severn Newton was an accomplished professional artist when she went with her husband the archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton and her teenaged friend Gertrude Jekyll to the Ottoman Empire in October to December 1863. In between Charles’ work for the British Museum at Ephesos, Istanbul and Athens, they spent two weeks on holiday making sketches in Rhodes. Dream you are with them in the exhibition or by downloading the zine.
The display uses reproductions of Mary’s and Gertrude Jekyll’s visual and written narrative of their trip to Greece and Turkey to explore their own travels and how people in the Ottoman Empire are depicted. The combination of these two accounts together with Severn Newton’s images make for an alternative reading of the trip, including the differences in what the two women did and where they could go in comparison to the men, as opposed to the more formal account of Charles Thomas Newton. Of course, the direct voices of the Greek and Turkish people are absent, but Jekyll’s account and Severn Newton’s drawings put them back in the narrative, albeit indirectly and through the observation of two British female artists.
Books from the collection will be used (Newton’s showing sketches by his wife and one on Ephesos) with props and reproductions of the images plus text provided by the curator. A zine will also be available to print or download here to accompany the display or read it online here.
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