From woodcuts to Colin Firth: how Jane Austen’s tales have been pictured | Jane Austen

For the Twenty first-century Jane Austen fan, the pictures of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy within the beloved BBC sequence Pride and Prejudice or Anya Taylor-Joy’s big-screen portrayal of Emma stands out as the first to leap to thoughts.

But an exhibition opening in Bath celebrates the numerous methods illustrators of Austen’s work and adapters of her novels have depicted a few of her most cherished characters.

They embrace work by Hugh Thomson, who was tasked with offering 160 photographs for the first fully illustrated edition of Pride and Prejudice within the late Nineteenth century.

There are sketches for Helen Jerome’s lively 1936 theatre version of Pride and Prejudice, credited with turning Darcy right into a smouldering heart-throb, which can have led to Firth and the well-known sodden shirt scene.

Also featured are extra restrained items by the wooden engraver and illustrator Joan Hassall, who produced elegant illustrations for the Folio Society’s sequence of Austen novels within the Fifties and Sixties.

The exhibition at the Holburne Museum coincides with the launch of the Jane Austen festival in Bath on Friday, a 10-day celebration that shall be much more vibrant given that it’s the 250th anniversary of the author’s start.

Austen lived in Bath between 1801 and 1806 – certainly one of her addresses is simply throughout the street from the Holburne – although one other exhibition happening on the opposite aspect of town argues that, truly, she wasn’t very keen on the place.

Hannah N Mills, the Holburne exhibition’s curator, stated good illustrations had helped make Austen one of many UK’s most celebrated and long-lasting authors.

She stated: “In our modern age it is the film and TV adaptations that influence our impressions of the characters. For Austen’s fans in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was the illustrations on the page. We wanted to look at how the illustrations married with the words.”

Mills stated among the many photographs she was notably keen on was a Nineteenth-century Thomson pen-and-ink drawing of a scene from Mansfield Park that includes Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram. “It’s just so beautiful and there’s such sentiment there.”

Thomson was an Irish artist who had made his title within the Eighteen Eighties illustrating Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. He went on to turn out to be one of the vital standard and profitable guide illustrators of the Victorian period.

Mills can be eager on the woodcuts accomplished by Hassall for the Folio Society’s editions. “They are iconic and constantly being reproduced. Early on, there were a lot of male illustrators but as you move towards the 21st century it’s more female illustrators.”

She stated she wished to function costume sketches for the Jerome play partly as a result of it threw ahead to the trendy incarnations of Darcy, the place he begins to turn out to be “portrayed as a heart-throb”.

Bringing the present nearly bang updated is the sketchbook Coralie Bickford-Smith used to create a contemporary iteration: Penguin’s “clothbound classic” version of Sense and Sensibility. “I love what Penguin are doing with Coralie Bickford-Smith, taking motifs from the books and making beautiful covers out of them. They are for the modern age but still harking back to the history.”