Bringing Jane Austen’s world to life with colour

Edward Bulmer was honoured to be approached by Winchester College Heritage to create a set of bespoke paint colours for the rooms that Jane Austen lived in for the final months of her life. By carefully scraping back layers of paint, the original Georgian decorating scheme was uncovered and  Edward specially mixed new colours to match those original finishes.

These colours were used in the rooms Jane Austen and her sister, Cassandra, rented, and they help to invoke how they might have looked during their short time there in 1817.

Edward tells of his time in College Street. ‘It is rare to feel the presence of a past life in an old house – they have hosted so many after all. I am someone who can anthropomorphise the skill required to fashion a piece of furniture or weave a carpet, I am also someone with a long-held devotion to the works of Jane Austen. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for how viscerally I felt her presence standing in the room in which she spent much of the last two months of her life.

It was a genteel but simple room in a Georgian house in College Street, Winchester.

Walls had since been changed and a staircase moved, but the character of the building not lost. The door to Jane’s room had a cylindrical brass knob which would have been recently fitted when her feeble hand turned it. Her presence was palpable – the simplicity of the interior was so in tune with what we know of her outlook and circumstances that it somehow deepened the sense of it.’

On creating the white, Edward says ‘Jane’s White required only a modicum of pigment to render it ‘the neat little  drawing-room’ that Jane deemed it in a letter.’

‘Cassandra’s room and the room occasionally used by her brother were given a little more richness by the use of cobalt blue and red and yellow ochre pigments. Not expensive tints, but in reasonable quantities to give warm mid-colours, creating Brownlow North’s Red,  Cassandra’s Slate and Mrs David’s Pink. ‘

The colours are named after people alive at the time. Brownlow North was the Bishop of Winchester in 1817 and the diocese owned 8 College Street and Mrs David was the landlady of the property.

Edward felt that ‘the fragmentary presence of these colours under subsequent layers, like the scant records of the Austen’s brief tenure, allowed a remarkably telling restoration, bolstered I believe by that strong sense of a remarkable soul that though failed in the end by a weak body, produced work of enduring popularity and prescience.’

8 College Street is open to the public for a short while to the public in advance of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth on 16th December this year. Unfortunately all tickets have already been snapped up, but this important space remains as a monument to such an important figure in British literary history.

All photography credits: Camilla Winter Moore