Mrs. F. Nevill Jackson (1861–1947)

Mrs. F. Nevill Jackson was a woman who wrote voluminously on the history of decorative art. Emily Gatliff Nevill Jackson (Mrs. Frederick Nevill Jackson1861-1947). Her series of articles on the history of lacemaking and types of lace objects appeared in The Connoisseur, and she also wrote one on the subject for the early Burlington as well as serving on its first Consultative Committee. Nevill Jackson was one of several writers who wrote about lace and needlework (another was Lady Marian Alford (1817-1888), an early expert on lace for the Royal School at South Kensington), and certainly The Connoisseur articles, although aimed at the collector rather than the practitioner, drew on the South Kensington collection. In 1905, this relationship was reciprocated when Nevill Jackson offered her own substantial collection of lace for sale to South Kensington. Her articles and a volume titled A History of Hand-made Lace (1900) served as a catalyst for other women writers, such as Mrs. R. E. Head and Margaret Jourdain (1876-1951), to contribute to the field of lace and needlework in the new art presses. After 1905, Nevill Jackson turned her attention to a wide variety of other decorative subjects, including china collecting, bookplates, door knockers, toys, and silhouettes. And in 1911, her volume on the History of Silhouettes was The Art Press at the Fin de siècle published by The Connoisseur. For the purposes of her research, Nevill Jackson collected the albums of the early American silhouettes compiled by the French artist Augustin-Amant-Constance-Fidèle Édouart (1789-1861). These portraits f figures, such as United States President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), were completed when Édouart spent a decade in America between 1839 and 1849. Interestingly, when the New York Historical Society declined to purchase them for £10 per figure, she sold them individually in addition to copies she had made as “photo facsimiles ”. The entire set could be purchased for £800. Clearly, Nevill Jackson was a writer carefully attuned to the American interest in genealogy; she located a market, not only for her writing, but also for objects acquired in the process. Her example suggests that women were active agents in the correlation between collecting and writing about collecting.