Sculptor whom the Mapping Sculpture project (see ‘Bibliography’, below) has provisionally identified with the stonemason of that name living and working with his father (also Robert Jackson) in Norwich at the time of the 1841 census. Shortly after this date he moved to London where he was taken on by the sculptor John Thomas as chief assistant in the workshop he had established at the Palace of Westminster to provide statues and ornamental carving for the new building; this work was completed in 1853. If Rupert Gunnis’s statement (repeated by Roscoe in 2009) that Jackson was working in Rome from 1860 to 1863 is accurate, he nevertheless managed to maintain addresses in those years at 16 Maida Vale (1860) and 17 Newman Street, London (1861–63), from whence he sent to the Royal Academy of Art eight portrait busts and a bust entitled Autumn. In 1863 he completed two major commissions, a memorial to Lieutenant Robert Anderson for Glasgow Cathedral and a marble drinking fountain, known as The Boy Fountain, for St James’s Park, London (repeatedly damaged over the years, important parts of the figure now comprise inferior replacements). Jackson had by this date established a workshop employing other sculptors, the fountain, as it came to light many years later, having been both designed and carved for him by Charles H. Mabey (who later went on to run a similar operation himself). Jackson showed at the Royal Academy annual exhibitions from 1851 to 1878, a total of 31 works, mostly portraits with a handful of imaginative subjects. Two of his contributions in this latter category, Spring and Summer, shown in 1869, were sold through the dealers Austin and Seeley to the Board of Works for the gardens of Hampton Court Palace where they were renamed Flora and Adonis. In Algernon Graves’s dictionary of Royal Academy contributors, Jackson’s marble statue from the 1872 exhibition, The Hon. A. Campbell, youngest son of the Earl of Cawdor (the plaster model for which he had exhibited in 1867), is listed under the name ‘G.R. Jackson’. This anomaly may be the result of Graves taking the name from the index of the original catalogue rather than the catalogue page itself which gives the expected ‘R. Jackson’. The marble, which today is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is signed ‘R-JACKSON-Sc/29.MAIDA VALE’, confirming Robert Jackson’s authorship. In 1870, his statue of Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, was erected in Westminster Abbey, the Illustrated London News (16 July 1870, p. 76) expressing surprise that despite the newspaper’s repeated attempts to bring Jackson to the attention of the public, he remained little known. This statue, the writer confidently forecast, could not fail ‘to raise the artist’s reputation’. And yet this was to be his last significant commission. Nothing is known of his work after 1878, although he gave his occupation to the 1891 census as Sculptor employer and to the 1901 census as Sculptor working at home. His son, also Robert Jackson, appears to have worked for him c.1881–91, but at an unknown date gave up sculpture to become a dealer in prints and drawings. Robert Jackson’s firm had ceased operating by 1905.
Bibliography: D. Bilbey and M. Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2002, p. 329; A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904 (1905–06), Vol IV (Harral–Lawranson), 1906, pp. 225, 229-30; S. Groom, ‘The Progression of Statuary in the Privy Garden at Hampton Court Palace’, The London Gardener, Vol. 8 (2002/2003), pp. 36–51; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1951, London, [1968], p. 217; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 211, 215; Mapping Sculpture: (i) ‘Robert Jackson’, (ii) ‘Robert Jackson jnr’; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 663–64; V&A – collections: ‘The Hon. Alexander Francis Henry Campbell’; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxii, 197, 240, 452.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2024
