JAMESON, ANNA BROWNELL (1794-1860), British writer, was born in Dublin on the 17th of May 1794. Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy (d. 1842), a miniature and enamel painter, removed to England in 1798 with his family, and eventually settled at Hanwell, near London. At sixteen years of age Anna became governess in the family of the marquis of Winchester. In 1821 she was engaged to Robert Jameson. The engagement was broken off, and Anna Murphy accompanied a young pupil to Italy, writing in a fictitious character a narrative of what she saw and did. This diary she gave to a bookseller on condition of receiving a guitar if he secured any profits. Colburn ultimately published it as The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), which attracted much attention. The author was governess to the children of Mr Littleton, afterwards Lord Hatherton, from 1821 to 1825, when she married Robert Jameson. The marriage proved unhappy; when, in 1829, Jameson was appointed puisne judge in the island of Dominica the couple separated without regret, and Mrs Jameson visited the Continent again with her father.
The first work which displayed her powers of original thought was her Characteristics of Women (1832). These analyses of Shakespeare’s heroines are remarkable for delicacy of critical insight and fineness of literary touch. They are the result of a penetrating but essentially feminine mind, applied to the study of individuals of its own sex, detecting characteristics and defining differences not perceived by the ordinary critic and entirely overlooked by the general reader. German literature and art had aroused much interest in England, and Mrs Jameson paid her first visit to Germany in 1833. The conglomerations of hard lines, cold colours and pedantic subjects which decorated Munich under the patronage of King Louis of Bavaria, were new to the world, and Mrs Jameson’s enthusiasm first gave them an English reputation.
In 1836 Mrs Jameson was summoned to Canada by her husband, who had been appointed chancellor of the province of Toronto. He failed to meet her at New York, and she was left to make her way alone at the worst season of the year to Toronto. After six months’ experiment she felt it useless to prolong a life far from all ties of family happiness and opportunities of usefulness. Before leaving, she undertook a journey to the depths of the Indian settlements in Canada; she explored Lake Huron, and saw much of emigrant and Indian life unknown to travellers, which she afterwards embodied in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. She returned to England in 1838. At this period Mrs Jameson began making careful notes of the chief private art collections in and near London. The result appeared in her Companion to the Private Galleries (1842), followed in the same year by the Handbook to the Public Galleries. She edited the Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters in 1845. In the same year she visited her friend Ottilie von Goethe. Her friendship with Lady Byron dates from about this time and lasted for some seven years; it was brought to an end apparently through Lady Byron’s unreasonable temper. A volume of essays published in 1846 contains one of Mrs Jameson’s best pieces of work, The House of Titian. In 1847 she went to Italy with her niece and subsequent biographer (Memoirs, 1878), Geraldine Bate (Mrs Macpherson), to collect materials for the work on which her reputation rests—her series of Sacred and Legendary Art. The time was ripe for such contributions to the traveller’s library. The Acta Sanctorum and the Book of the Golden Legend had had their readers, but no one had ever pointed out the connexion between these tales and the works of Christian art. The way to these studies had been pointed out in the preface to Kugler’s Handbook of Italian Painting by Sir Charles Eastlake, who had intended pursuing the subject himself. Eventually he made over to Mrs Jameson the materials and references he had collected. She recognized the extent of the ground before her as a mingled sphere of poetry, history, devotion and art. She infected her readers with her own enthusiastic admiration; and, in spite of her slight technical and historical equipment, Mrs. Jameson produced a book which thoroughly deserved its great success.
She also took a keen interest in questions affecting the education, occupations and maintenance of her own sex. Her early essay on The Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses was the work of one who knew both sides; and in no respect does she more clearly prove the falseness of the position she describes than in the certainty with which she predicts its eventual reform. To her we owe the first popular enunciation of the principle of male and female co-operation in works of mercy and education. In her later years she took up a succession of subjects all bearing on the same principles of active benevolence and the best ways of carrying them into practice. Sisters of charity, hospitals, penitentiaries, prisons and workhouses all claimed her interest—all more or less included under those definitions of “the communion of love and communion of labour” which are inseparably connected with her memory. To the clear and temperate forms in which she brought the results of her convictions before her friends in the shape of private lectures—published as Sisters of Charity (1855) and The Communion of Labour (1856)—may be traced the source whence later reformers and philanthropists took counsel and courage.
Mrs Jameson died on the 17th of March 1860. She left the last of her Sacred and Legendary Art series in preparation. It was completed, under the title of The History of Our Lord in Art, by Lady Eastlake.
JAMESON (or Jamesone), GEORGE (c. 1587-1644), Scottish portrait-painter, was born at Aberdeen, where his father was architect and a member of the guild. After studying painting under Rubens at Antwerp, with Vandyck as a fellow pupil, he returned in 1620 to Aberdeen, where he was married in 1624 and remained at least until 1630, after which he took up his residence in Edinburgh. He was employed by the magistrates of Edinburgh to copy several portraits of the Scottish kings for presentation to Charles I. on his first visit to Scotland in 1633, and the king rewarded him with a diamond ring from his own finger. This circumstance at once established Jameson’s fame, and he soon found constant employment in painting the portraits of the Scottish nobility and gentry. He also painted a portrait of Charles, which he declined to sell to the magistrates of Aberdeen for the price they offered. He died at Edinburgh in 1644.
JAMESON, LEANDER STARR (1853- ), British colonial statesman, son of R. W. Jameson, a writer to the signet in Edinburgh, was born at Edinburgh in 1853, and was educated for the medical profession at University College Hospital, London (M.R.C.S. 1875; M.D. 1877). After acting as house physician, house surgeon and demonstrator of anatomy, and showing promise of a successful professional career in London, his health broke down from overwork in 1878, and he went out to South Africa and settled down in practice at Kimberley. There he rapidly acquired a great reputation as a medical man, and, besides numbering President Kruger and the Matabele chief Lobengula among his patients, came much into contact with Cecil Rhodes. In 1888 his influence with Lobengula was successfully exerted to induce that chieftain to grant the concessions to the agents of Rhodes which led to the formation of the British South Africa Company; and when the company proceeded to open up Mashonaland, Jameson abandoned his medical practice and joined the pioneer expedition of 1890. From this time his fortunes were bound up with Rhodes’s schemes in the north. Immediately after the pioneer column had occupied Mashonaland, Jameson, with F. C. Selous and A. R. Colquhoun, went east to Manicaland and was instrumental in securing the greater part of that country, to which Portugal was laying claim, for the Chartered Company. In 1891 Jameson succeeded Colquhoun as administrator of Rhodesia. The events connected with his vigorous administration and the wars with the Matabele are narrated under [Rhodesia]. At the end of 1894 “Dr Jim” (as he was familiarly called) came to England and was fêted on all sides; he was made a C.B., and returned to Africa in the spring of 1895 with enhanced prestige. On the last day of that year the world was startled to learn that Jameson, with a force of 600 men, had made a raid into the Transvaal from Mafeking in support of a projected rising in Johannesburg, which had been connived at by Rhodes at the Cape (see [Rhodes] and [Transvaal]). Jameson’s force was compelled to surrender at Doornkop, receiving a guarantee that the lives of all would be spared; he and his officers were sent to Pretoria, and, after a short delay, during which time sections of the Boer populace clamoured for the execution of Jameson, President Kruger on the surrender of Johannesburg (January 7) handed them over to the British government for punishment. They were tried in London under the Foreign Enlistment Act in May 1896, and Dr Jameson was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment at Holloway. He served a year in prison, and was then released on account of ill health. He still retained the affections of the white population of Rhodesia, and subsequently returned there in an unofficial capacity. He was the constant companion of Rhodes on his journeys up to the end of his life, and when Rhodes died in May 1902 Jameson was left one of the executors of his will. In 1903 Jameson came forward as the leader of the Progressive (British) party in Cape Colony; and that party being victorious at the general election in January-February 1904, Jameson formed an administration in which he took the post of prime minister. He had to face a serious economic crisis and strenuously promoted the development of the agricultural and pastoral resources of the colony. He also passed a much needed Redistribution Act, and in the session of 1906 passed an Amnesty Act restoring the rebel voters to the franchise. Jameson, as prime minister of Cape Colony, attended the Colonial conference held in London in 1907. In September of that year the Cape parliament was dissolved, and as the elections for the legislative council went in favour of the Bond, Jameson resigned office, 31st of January 1908 (see [Cape Colony]: History). In 1908 he was chosen one of the delegates from Cape Colony to the intercolonial convention for the closer union of the South African states, and he took a prominent part in settling the terms on which union was effected in 1909. It was at Jameson’s suggestion that the Orange River Colony was renamed Orange Free State Province.