May 17, 1794

Anna Brownell Jameson (May 17, 1794  to March 17, 1860) was a Victorian writer who through her non fiction books, supported her parents and siblings. She had some money from her husband who lived on a different continent. They married after she had been working as a governess, and published essays such as "On the Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses." The marriage seems to have been a facade at the end, and her husband left all his money to a Canadian couple who had looked after him in his last illness. By this time (1854) she had an established reputation as an authority on art, and had other financial resources. She died after walking home from the British Library in a snowstorm, and contracting pneumonia.

The following is a sample of her art criticism--A cat in Ghirlandaio's "The Last Supper" according to Jameson," represents the fiend." This was not a controversial view at the time. We can sample her art criticism in a later book. Legends of the Madonna, as represented in the fine arts, (1857) was published before Darwin's scholarly conclusions.

... The Dove, as the received emblem of the Holy Spirit, is properly placed above, as hovering over the Virgin. There is an exception to this rule in a very interesting picture in the Louvre, where the Holy Dove (with the nimbus) is placed at the feet of the Child. This is so unusual, and so contrary to all the received proprieties of religious art, that I think the nimbus may have been added afterwards....[Regarding other birds]—The bird in the Egyptian hieroglyphics signified the soul of man. In the very ancient pictures there can be no doubt, I think, that the bird in the hand of Christ figured the soul, or the spiritual as opposed to the material. But, in the later pictures, the original meaning being lost, birds became mere ornamental accessories, or playthings. Sometimes it is a parrot from the East, sometimes a partridge (the partridge is frequent in the Venetian pictures) : sometimes a goldfinch, as in Raphael's Madonna del Cardellino. In a Madonna by Guercino, the Mother holds a bird perched on her hand, and the Child, with a most naive infantine expression, shrinks back from it. ...In a picture by Baroccio, he holds [the Christ child] up before a cat: so completely were the original symbolism and all the religious proprieties of art at this time set aside. Other animals are occasionally introduced. Extremely offensive are the apes when admitted into devotional pictures. We have associations with the animal as a mockery of the human, which render it a very disagreeable accessory. It appears that, in the sixteenth century, it became the fashion to keep apes as pets, and every reader of Vasari will remember the frequent mention of these animals as pets and favourites of the artists. Thus only can I account for the introduction of the ape, particularly in the Ferrarese pictures.... In a famous picture by Titian, ' La Vierge au Lapin,' we have the rabbit. The introduction of these and other animals marks the decline of religious art."

Obituaries in The Athenaeum, the Art-Journal, and the Gentleman's Magazine regarded this series as 'the greatest literary labour of a busy life,' 'books which have become standard works in Art-literature', and maintained that as 'an art-critic Mrs. Jameson was almost unrivalled'." These quotes come from the Oxford Dictonary of Biography. Later though John Ruskin would say: [Jameson] "knows as much of art as the cat [does]... She 'was absolutely without knowledge or instinct of painting (and had no sharpness of insight even for anything else)."

Although Jameson does not seem to have been a cat person, that may have been because she was so darn busy.