By donation - all money goes to adopting two of the books on display. Book here.

Holiday Sketches looks at the visit by Ann Mary Severn Newton, an accomplished professional artist, her husband the archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton and her teenage friend Gertrude Jekyll to the Ottoman Empire in 1863. In between Charles’ work for the British Museum at Ephesos, Istanbul and Athens, they spent two weeks on holiday making sketches in Rhodes. This display uses the historic book collections of the Portico Library to map their journey and the people they met, wrote about and sketched in Rhodes.

There is an accompanying zine that you can download here: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/c69747dc8a.html

The display and zine has come out of a Developing Your Creative Practice grant awarded by Arts Council England to cultural historian (and Creative Producer of the Portico) Dr Debbie Challis.

This is a chance to grab a drink, chat and take part in a 30 minute in-conversation at 6.30pm on the themes of the exhibition and applying empathetic history in practice between the Chair of the Public Programme Carol Ann Whitehead and curator Dr Debbie Challis. If you would like to find out more about Ann Mary Severn Newton and the communities of people in Rhodes, please read Debbie’s blog here: https://www.debbiechallis.com/blog

Dr Debbie Challis FRHistS is Creative Producer of the Portico Library and a cultural historian with an expertise on the reception of classical antiquity in the nineteenth century. She is Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool and is currently researching and writing about the life of a mid Victorian female artist called Mary Severn as well as travellers in the 19thC Ottoman Empire. She is passionate about socially informed and empathetic practice in public engagement with history and is a resident expert on Alex Andreou's Podyssey (a podcast on the legacy of Ancient Greece).