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Entrance to the Exhibition is FREE and there is no need to book to attend.

1 February - 14 March 2025

‘It was such a pleasure to me to sit out in the open garden and paint.’
 
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.
 
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 are used (Newton’s showing sketches by his wife and one on Ephesos) with props and reproductions of the images and an accompanying zine is available to read here.


This display is part of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant awarded to Dr Debbie Challis in June 2024. She is author of Archaeology of Race. The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (Bloomsbury 2013) and From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (Duckworth 2008). She has published on Charles Newton’s relationship with John Ruskin, his writing on ancient art, his role in collecting for the British Museum and, most recently, on the artist Ann Mary Severn Newton, Newton’s wife, in Gabriel Moshenska and Claire Lewis (eds), Life Writing in the History of Archaeology: Critical Approaches (UCL Press, 2023). She is co-editing a book with Lucia Patrizio Gunning and Thomas Kiely on the life and work of Charles Thomas Newton for UCL Press. She is Creative Producer at the Portico Library Manchester, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Milesian Tales Project at the University of Liverpool. Her website is www.debbiechallis.com.

Books from the Combined Classics Library.

Exhibition Access
  • 3rd Floor Senate House is accessible by lift from the ground floor or by stairs.
  • Toilets are located on the third and second floors near the lifts.

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