Emily Stackhouse
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Emily Stackhouse | |
|---|---|
| Born | 15 July 1811 |
| Died | 1 April 1870 (aged 58) |
| Known for | Illustration |
| Style | Botanical art |
Emily Stackhouse (15 July 1811 – 1 April 1870) was a 19th-century British botanical artist and plant collector. She collected and painted flowers and mosses throughout the British isles, and her work was widely reproduced in a series of popular books issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Many of her watercolours show that she had collected and depicted specific plants years earlier than their accredited discovery in Cornwall, and it is now acknowledged that she collected and classified nearly all of the British mosses.
Emily Stackhouse was born on 15 July 1811 in Modbury, Devon, one of six children of Rev. William Stackhouse III and Sarah Stackhouse.[2][3][4] The Stackhouses were an old Cornish family that included several naturalists; her great-uncle was the botanist John Stackhouse.[5] Emily may have lived for a time with her second cousin Frances Stackhouse Acton, a botanist and botanical artist whose father Thomas Andrew Knight was also a botanist.[2] She also frequently stayed with William Rashleigh, a Member of Parliament and naturalist who was married to her aunt.[2]
In 1830, Emily's father inherited Trehane, a large estate with a Queen Anne mansion, and a few years later the family settled there. The manor house burned to the ground in 1946, but the estate's home farm, Trehane Barton, is now a listed Site of Special Scientific Interest. Among Stackhouse's neighbours near Trehane were the amateur botanists John and Mary Esther Hawkins; the latter was the granddaughter of botanist Humphry Sibthorp.[2]
