Stephen Jackson, Senior Curator, Furniture & Woodwork, National Museums Scotland


Stephen Jackson is Senior Curator, Furniture and Woodwork, at National Museums Scotland and the author of Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914. Stephen’s lecture will place the region’s makers and their work within a broad national context.
Stephen read history at Cambridge before mutating into an art historian at St Andrews. Early jobs included the world’s only museum on a roundabout, in his native London, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, though he has now worked at Chambers Street in Edinburgh for 25 years. There he curated Green Design: Creativity with a Conscience, one of the first exhibitions anywhere to address sustainability in design, and was involved over many years in the renewal and redisplay of the former Royal Museum building. His collecting for NMS has ranged from furniture by Thomas Chippendale and Charles Rennie Mackintosh to ceramics by Braque, embroideries by May Morris, and the world’s oldest bagpipe chanter.
Since 2019 he has edited the journal of the Regional Furniture Society, and he is also involved in the Furniture History Society's British and Irish Furniture Makers Online website. He is a Council member of the Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group and previously served on the Collections Advisory Panel of the National Trust for Scotland and Museum Galleries Scotland's Recognition Scheme committee.