Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914

In March 2024, National Museums Scotland will publish Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914, the first comprehensive narrative account of furniture-making in Scotland. The author of this new book, Stephen Jackson, has been Senior Curator, Furniture and Woodwork at NMS for over twenty years. In this lecture he will speak about a range of new discoveries ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, as well as the challenges of writing a broad survey.

Stephen Jackson began working with furniture at the Geffrye Museum, now the Museum of the Home, in London on graduating from Cambridge in 1993. He wrote an MPhil with David Jones at St Andrews before working as a curator at Middlesex University, Brent Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He joined National Museums Scotland in 1999. He has published nineteen journal articles on furniture and interior design. He has been working towards this project for a long time and during 2018-19 undertook a programme of fieldwork on pre-1700 Scottish furniture funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

A Zoom link will be sent to all members in advance of the lecture.

Desk and bookcase, padouk, attributed to Francis Brodie, Edinburgh, c. 1755 (National Museums Scotland)