Gervase Frank Ashworth Jackson-Stops, O.B.E.

Gervase Jackson-Stops was born on 26 April 1947, near Towcester, Northamptonshire. He was the second of four sons, three of whom followed their father into the family firm of estate agents, Jackson-Stops and Staff, of which he was principal. From Harrow, Gervase, the odd one out, went to Christ Church, Oxford, and stayed on to research French influence on English architectural decoration in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though he abandoned his doctoral studies, he always intended to write a major work (which might have materialized had he lived longer) on Daniel Marot, the Huguenot designer, c. 1660-1752, who fascinated him and whom, to a large extent, he emulated. Marot had supervised the planning of the interiors and gardens of William III's palaces in the Netherlands and England; he could design fabrics, book bindings, furniture or garden decorations, and Jackson-Stops' talents were to prove equally eclectic and discerning. The Museums Association awarded him a studentship in 1969, and he spent the ensuing two years in the furniture department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. From there he joined the National Trust, first as a part-time research assistant in 1972 and then as full-time architectural adviser in 1975, while writing regular articles on country houses for Country Life, through which he became known to a popular audience. He was also general editor of the authoritative guides to National Trust properties; but Jackson-Stops will be remembered for his sensitive restoration of magnificent houses and gardens rather than for his publications, estimable as these undoubtedly are. In the late 1970s he led a highly professional campaign to save the manor house of Canons Ashby from dilapidation and ruin. He negotiated the funds to buy and endow the house and the adjacent medieval priory church for the National Trust and from 1981-4 masterminded their restoration. During this time he was also instrumental in acquiring Belton, Kedleston, Fountains Abbey, Chastleton and Calke Abbey for the Trust and played a crucial role in the restoration of the pleasure grounds and garden buildings at Stowe, a place close to his heart since it was the two great sales there in the 1920s that established his maternal grandfather's reputation as an estate agent. Jackson-Stops' own highly individual taste could not be satisfied by any ordinary house, and in 1975 he bought the Earl of Halifax's fabulous eighteenth-century Menagerie at Horton, Northamptonshire, as his own home and spent the next twenty years, and a considerable fortune, restoring and embellishing it with the help of friends. He created a large new garden, complete with an obelisk, thatched temples, a shell grotto and bath house. His fame spread beyond national boundaries, and in 1981 he was appointed organizer of the monumental Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a task which was to occupy him for four years and which earned him the Presidential Award for Design in 1986 and, in the same year, the O.B.E. at the age of thirty-nine. The exhibition was followed by others in the United States but he continued to work as architectural adviser to the National Trust and, always brimming with energy, found time to write lively articles for Country Life and to produce books such as The English Country House; a grand tour (1985), The Country House Garden (l987) and An English Arcadia (1992), while serving on the Historic Buildings Advisory Committee of English Heritage 1986-8, the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art from 1988 and as president of the Friends of Northampton Museum and Art Gallery from 1986. He died on 2 July 1995.