Seeing Art Through Austen’s Eyes
Marsha Miller
A preview of the exhibition "What Jane Saw."
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: May 24, 2013
On May 24, 1813, Jane Austen went to a crowded art gallery on Pall Mall in London, looking for Mrs. Darcy.
“I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow,” Austen wrote that morning to her
sister, referring to the romantic heroine whose happy ending she had
sketched out in “Pride and Prejudice,” published four months earlier.
She came back disappointed, having failed to spot a ringer for the
former Elizabeth Bennet among the actresses, aristocrats, royal
mistresses and assorted well-married ladies on the gallery walls, which
were covered with portraits by Joshua Reynolds. “I can only imagine that
Mr. D prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed
to the public eye,” Austen wrote jokingly later that evening.
But now, precisely 200 years later, an ambitious online exhibition called “What Jane Saw”
will allow modern-day Janeiacs to wander through a meticulous
reconstruction of the exhibition and put themselves, if not quite in
Austen’s shoes, at least behind her eyes.
“It’s the closest thing to time travel on the Web,” said Janine Barchas,
an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin,
who led the project.
Such time travel is on a lot of Austen fans’ minds in this year of global celebration of the 200th anniversary
of “Pride and Prejudice.” And “What Jane Saw,” which went live just
before midnight London time on Thursday, can be seen as a scholarly
answer to extravagant bicentennial reanimations like the Netherfield ball, the BBC’s recent staging of the dance where Darcy and Elizabeth shared some pivotal banter.
But a reconstruction of the Reynolds show would be of interest, scholars
say, even if Austen had never gone anywhere near it. It was the first
commemorative museum show dedicated to a single artist, and perhaps the
first modern blockbuster, attracting as many as 800 people a day. There
were celebrities in the crowd — both Lord Byron and the prince regent
attended the red carpet opening — and also on the walls, where the first
thing visitors saw were portraits of George III, the reigning monarch, and the theatrical grande dame Sarah Siddons, juxtaposed in an Annie Leibovitz-like array.
The exhibition “was a wonderful moment in the history of celebrity
culture,” said Joseph Roach, a professor of theater and English at Yale
University and the author of “It”
(2007), a cultural history of the charisma that distinguishes
“abnormally interesting” people. “There was a new kind of royalty
emerging.”
And Austen, Ms. Barchas said, would have been as interested in that new
royalty as any modern reader gobbling up TMZ updates about Kate
Middleton and Brangelina. In her recent book, “Matters of Fact in Jane Austen,”
Ms. Barchas traces the way Austen wove sly nods to actresses, artists,
parliamentarians and scandal-ridden aristocrats into her novels — almost
“in the spirit of a preteen adorning a bedroom with Justin Bieber
posters,” as one reviewer put it.
Ms. Barchas’s celebrity-centric reading of Austen is part of a growing
body of scholarship that emphasizes the worldly, history-minded side of a
writer long seen as a country mouse preoccupied with timeless truths.
But assembling “What Jane Saw” required meticulousness more typical of
construction engineers than of paparazzi.
The gallery, in a building that was subsequently demolished, was
recreated using the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, based on precise
measurements recorded in an 1860 book. Ms. Barchas and her team then
spent a summer working out how the 141 paintings listed in a 20-page
pamphlet sold at the exhibition were arranged on the walls, a process
that involved a lot of Rubik’s Cube-like playing around.
“I feel pretty sure this is the way the exhibit was actually hung,” Ms. Barchas said.
Seeing the pictures on virtual walls, scholars who have visited the Web
site say, reveals juicy “hidden narratives” that the viewers of 1813,
including Austen, would have picked up on. Portraits of the prince
regent and his mistress, for example, were kept at a discreet remove,
while an image of George III was hung cheekily close to a painting based
on “King Lear,” a play whose performance was essentially forbidden at
the time, lest it raise uncomfortable thoughts about the current
monarch’s madness.
“You can imagine what it would’ve been like as an early-19th-century
viewer of this kind of painting as theater,” said Devoney Looser, an
Austen specialist at the University of Missouri (who, perhaps not
incidentally, appears in her local roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen). “That would have been a really exciting part of life then.”
Ms. Barchas’s team at the university’s Texas Advanced Computing Center
is exploring a “gamified” version of the project, involving 3-D goggles
that allow full immersion, including an option of bringing viewers’
angle of vision in line with Austen’s own. (Among the details still to
be worked out: was Austen, who was described as tall and slender, closer
to 5-foot-4 or 5-foot-8?)
If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy
to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine
Miss Jane.
Ms. Barchas recalled a recent conversation with a programmer working on
the project’s metadata: “He said, ‘O.K., I’m going to go home now and
tell my mother-in-law that I have not been wasting all these years
working with computers, because now I am working on Jane Austen.’ ”
