A botanist, botanical illustrator and writer.
Stackhouse was born in 1811 at Modbury, Devon, the fifth of six children of the Reverand William Stackhouse (1772-1861) and his wife Sarah Smith (1774-1845). All six children were born in the vicarage at Modbury, where their father had been granted the living of the fourteenth-century re-built church of St George, after his education at Eton (the parish’s patrons) and Trinity College, Oxford. Her brother died of cholera at Eton in 1824, and her younger sister, Ann, died in 1831, aged 17, at Modbury.
Four albums of Emily’s ‘beautiful botanical drawings’ (Royal Cornwall Gazette) were displayed at the 14th Annual Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Exhibition, Falmouth in 1846, where they received a Bronze Medal in the Natural History section. The judges stated doubts about their placement there, thinking they belonged for judgment in the amateur artist category. In her mind, however, her work in its true light was identification and classification with description and her 1853 Exhibition at the Polytechnic was entered similarly, with the same results and glowing reviews.
As her modern-day biographer, Clifford Evans, has aptly stated, Emily Stackhouse was ‘a botanist who painted’ and one of the great un-heralded illustrators of her time. Her own writings were largely unattributed (from ‘a lady’) contributions to the newsletters and journals of the Royal Institution of Cornwall (RIC), but in two articles, ‘Musci, Natives of Cornwall’ and ‘Rare Plants in the Neighbourhood of Truro’ she also established her credentials as a recognized writer.
Bibliography:
Cornwall Records Office (CRO), NRA 26916: DD PL
Dare, D. and Hardie, M. (2008) A Passion for Nature, 19th-Century Naturalism in the Circle of Charles Alexander Johns. Penzance: Patten Press
Evans, Clifford (2008) ‘A Botanist who Painted: Emily Stackhouse’ in Dare, D. and Hardie, M. (2008) A Passion for Nature, 19th-Century Naturalism in the Circle of Charles Alexander Johns. Penzance: Patten Press. pp 171-185.
Hardie-Budden, M. (2009) ‘Stackhouse, Emily (1811–1870)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography May [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/98100
Lewis, C. (2000) Gertrude Jekyll: The Making of a Garden Garden Art Press, a division of Antique Collectors’ Club. This revised edition of the 1984 First, includes plates by Emily Stackhouse, as provided by Clifford Evans.
Trehane, D. (1989) ‘Emily Stackhouse, 1811-1870,' The Cornish Garden: The Journal of the Cornwall Garden Society 32, pp 38-44
