News | January 30, 2025

Jane Austen, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Medieval Psalters in Morgan's 2025 Exhibition Schedule

Carmen González Fraile/Morgan Library & Museum

Master of the Berry Apocalypse, The Province of Charchan (Qiemo), in the Travels of Marco Polo. France, Paris, ca. 1410. 

Illustrated manuscripts, groundbreaking photographers, and America's unauthorized editions of Jane Austen feature in The Morgan Library & Museum's upcoming exhibitions in 2025 and 2026.

Currently running through May 25 is The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World which features the French 15th century Book of the Marvels of the World and looks at medieval conceptions and misconceptions of a global world, including rare illustrated manuscripts of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, a richly ornamented Ottoman Book of Wonders, made for a sultan’s daughter, and a medieval map of the Holy Land based on pilgrimage accounts.

From May 9 until August 17, visitors can enjoy A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial which commemorates purchases and gifts made in honor of the Morgan’s Centennial. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, the exhibition will include two manuscripts related to the publication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, Renaissance and modern bookbindings, and literary manuscripts by François-René de Chateaubriand, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.

Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron (May 30 - September 14) explores the career of photography’s first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815 - 1879) was born in Calcutta to a French mother and an English father. In 1848, with her husband and children she moved to England where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they socialised. Living on the Isle of Wight where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48 and over the next decade she created thousands of exposures and left an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition. She forged a name as a portraitist of leading figures such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin while she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. 

Jane Austen's 250th birthday is celebrated in A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, running June 6 through September 14. This focuses on Austen’s authorship and her gradual rise to international fame. Iconic artifacts from Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England, will join manuscripts, books, and artworks from the Morgan, as well as from a dozen institutional and private collections. The story of how Americans first encountered and responded to Austen’s novels, unbeknownst to her, emerges from four surviving copies of an unauthorized edition of Emma published during her lifetime.    
 
Sing a New Song: The Psalms in Medieval Art and Life traces the impact of the Psalms on the everyday lives of men and women in medieval Europe from the sixth to the 16th century including the creation of Psalters. The exhibition runs September 12 through January 4, 2026.