Magnus Jackson (1831 - 1891)

Born in Perth, the son of Thomas Jackson, a carver and gilder, Magnus initially worked in the family business. In the 1850s he went to London to train in the coming art of photography.

By 1860 he had returned and set up his own studio in Perth’s Marshall Place, quickly establishing himself as a commercial photographer. In 1878 he was elected a Town Councillor. By then he was running the family carving and gilding business in tandem with his studio work, while building a reputation for the quality of his landscape and nature studies. His particular interest was in photographing trees and he has left a remarkable series of tree ‘portraits’ taken on estates throughout Perthshire. Today he stands as a pioneer of landscape photography to rank alongside Roger Fenton and George Washington Wilson.

Magnus contributed articles to The Photographic News and the British Journal of Photography, one of which, ‘Some Remarkable Perthshire Trees’, seems an eerie foretelling of today’s Perthshire Big Tree Country project. He was appointed photographer to the Scottish Arboricultural Society, and in 1884 he was awarded the silver medal, the highest and only award made, at the International Forestry Exhibition in Edinburgh.

One of his Perth contemporaries, Thomas Hunter, wrote a series of sketches for the Perthshire Constitutional tracing the history of forestry in Perthshire which, it was pointed out at the time, is largely the history of forestry in Scotland – so influential were the local estate owners. Such was the demand for these sketches Hunter quickly revised and re-wrote them for a book, Woods, Forests and Estates of Perthshire, which appeared in 1883. Most of the illustrations in that book were engraved from Jackson’s portraits.

Woods Forests & Estates of Perthshire was reprinted by Castlepoint Press of Dalbeattie in 2002, with a front cover illustration of the last oaks of ‘Great Birnam Wood’ engraved from Jackson’s photograph.

Magnus Jackson left a collection of glass negatives that fall chiefly into two categories: his tree portraits and landscapes; and his studies of Perthshire folk, high and low born, at work and play. This collection forms the earliest photographic record of life in Perthshire and is in the safekeeping of Perth Museum and Art Gallery.

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