What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.
Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.
Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.
The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book:
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.
Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.
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