‘It was such a pleasure to me to sit out in the open garden and paint.’
Free - Portico Library opening times.
Holiday Sketches uses books from the Portico Collection and loaned art works to explore travel by a female artist, with her friend and husband, to an island, then in the Ottoman Empire, and the people she met and drew. It is curated by cultural historian and the Portico’s Creative Producer Dr Debbie Challis as part of a Arts Council England funded project.
Ann Mary Severn Newton, who was an accomplished professional artist, went with 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. Dream you are with them in the exhibition or by downloading the zine or reading it online here.
The display introduces the work of Mary Severn, then 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.
It is accompanied by photographs of what Rhodes is like now, seen through the eyes of a British family on holiday in 2025, as well as responses to how communities of people have changed due to geo-politics, persecution and war. You can explore the map of Rhodes with photographs on via History Pin here.
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 a resident expert on Alex Andreou's Podyssey. More information on the artists and Rhodes can be found on her blog.
