Holiday Sketches on Film

It has been a really busy 2 months, plus I got Covid while trying to complete stats for a major report for work. I did manage to redo the look of this website so hopefully it's more accessible. . . For the first time in 6 weeks or so I've had the energy to return to my happy place with Mary Severn Newton on a day off.

I made a film for the private view of my exhibition at the Portico Library on 17 June but have only just recorded the commentary based on what I said that evening. I am attempting to apply some of the learning around empathy and listening to people in the present and past I was taking from the therapeutic concepts course that I have just finished. It also draws on an article I have written that will be published later this year. In the meantime, I hope people enjoy seeing Rhodes town in 1863 and in 2025. This version with subtitles is available on the Portico Library's YouTube channel below.

History is not just about monuments and texts and buildings. It's also about people, and not just those who get biographies written about them or the leaders, but also the everyday, the people whose names we only know from the Journal of Gertrude Jekyll. From that journal we know the first names of their servants. We get a glimpse into women's domestic lives in the 19th century, privileged women, middle class, white artists who could travel but had their own issues to deal with.

There in those accounts, in those sketches by Mary Severn Newton, something that you don't see or you don't read in most history books about Victorian women or the Ottoman Empire, and that is why they're so valuable.