This piece was first written as a blog for the Pitt Rivers Museum - https://pittrivers-photo.blogspot.com/2020/02/on-hunt-for-jamesons-wattle-eye.html. I have refreshed it and changed some of the illustrations that went with it.
I first came upon the name of James Jameson through some research I was doing at the ornithological collection of the Natural History Museum which is housed in Tring, Hertfordshire. I had been looking for specimens of African birds for reference purposes in my paintings, when I noticed that a number of the bird skins carried old labels which showed that they had been collected by some of the famous English explorers of the nineteenth century. I was amazed that these small bundles of feather, claw and beak had survived not just the dangerous expeditions which had often killed the collectors themselves, but were still in pretty good condition considering they were nearly a hundred and fifty years old, which says a great deal about the skill of the curators and conservators at our national institutions.

His painting can be seen by clicking on this link -
Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 161.
In the course of trying to track down all the specimens collected by Emin Pasha, I stumbled across birds colected by James Jameson and found it interesting that they were linked by the EPRE, although sadly they were never to meet each other during the expedition.
Both men had specimens named after them and two birds in particular caught my attention because they were at the time new to science. Jameson's Firefinch is a lovely little crimson bird that is easy to see if you go on safari to East Africa, and Jameson's Wattle-eye is a tiny black and white bird with a red cheek and blue eyepatch.


Both his painting of the bird and the specimen itself have survived, albeit in separate museums. The painting on the right is by Jameson, painted on the spot and on the on the left is my painting of the skins of two species of wattle eye collected by him on the Congo River in 1887. His paintings are to be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum's Jameson Papers (see full list below).
James Sligo Jameson (1856–1888) was a minor member of the wealthy Jameson whiskey family who joined Stanley’s expedition to rescue the enigmatic Emin Pasha after he became stranded in Central Africa. Jameson was so keen to go on the expedition that he paid a thousand pounds for the privilege (enough to have bought a nice house in London at the time) and he assumed that he was going to be the naturalist, rather like Charles Darwin on The Beagle, collecting and painting animals, birds, butterflies and beetles. Things did not work out quite the way he had hoped, mainly due to the fact that Stanley had different priorities for him, and he spent most of the time stuck with the so-called “Rear Column” at Yambuya on a tributary of the Congo River.
In the year that he was living in the village - which still exists with the same name - Jameson was able to do some natural history collecting and in 1888 he sent 102 bird skins back to England where most of them are now in the Tring collection.
The birds were collected by being shot and then skinned to remove the bones and flesh, wiped over with arsenic soap or salt, often restuffed with grasses, natural seed pod fibres like kapok or cotton, and sewn up again in the rough shape of a sausage to be dried in the sun. His intention was that these skins would be transported back to London and kept in his private collection with the best specimens properly mounted by taxidermists. Occasionally, after he had shot the birds and before skinning them, Jameson would often paint them, not as dead specimens but by attempting to make them look lifelike.
This is difficult for any artist to achieve successfully and it takes a great deal of field observation of the living bird to get it right, and it has to be said that Jameson, despite the careful observations recorded in his diary, found it hard to get the birds he painted to look very lifelike, quite possibly because he was usually looking at them from a distance or along the barrel of a gun, but all of the birds can be readily identified from their plumage, shape of bills, and by the pencilled comments he makes about them in his field notebooks.


The painting by James Jameson is of the adult of a bird which the artist calls a 'small rail', given to him by a native and which he painted at Yambuya in the Congo region on 6 October 1887. It is, in fact, a White-spotted flufftail, which can look much more like a quail in the field, having a more compact stance than in his painting. My painting of the actual bird skin is on the left. The reason the head looks a little bald is because the bird was attacked by ants before it could be preserved properly.
Jameson died as he was trying to get back to civilisation and his personal effects were in two locations. Those that were with him when he died, including volumes 2 and 3 of his diary and his notebooks, were bundled up by Herbert Ward and sent back to his family in London in 1888. Another trunk, containing the first volume of his diary, had been left behind at Banalya where it was found by Stanley, transported down the East African coast and in 1890 shipped back to London. Jameson's family decided to publish his diaries in order to answer criticisms levelled against him by Stanley and in the process his wife edited them to tone down some of the events he recorded. Even though Jameson’s original journals and notebooks are lavishly illustrated, she commissioned another artist to rework the paintings he had done of the people and places he had visited in order to make them look more professional.
Only one of his drawings was published in the book “Jameson's Story of the Rear Column” - of Major Barttelot sitting on a drum in Yambuya village (see my article about Jameson’s People) and the original is to be found in one of the journals in the Pitt Rivers Museum's manuscript collections. Another of Jameson's drawings (a Christmas card) was published in "The Life of Edmund Musgrave Barttelot".
In the course of my research I discovered that although a great deal has been written about the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, nobody writing about it since Jameson's diary was published in 1890 has ever referred to his original writings and paintings and I assumed like others that they had simply become lost over the course of time.
Eventually I located them in the Pitt Rivers Museum, where with the help of the brilliant curators there we worked out that they had probably been donated by his widow or daughter along with some of his ethnographic collection nearly a century ago. The most beautiful of Jameson's paintings are of birds and other fauna, but none of them has previously been published and few people have studied them. I have also managed to track down a dozen or so of the actual bird specimens that Jameson painted before he carefully tucked them away in a tin chest to be sent down the Congo River and back to England.
Jameson shot a number of birds (particularly sunbirds) which he illustrated as if they were perched on flowers or against the backdrop of a river scene, following a convention to be found in a number of illustrated bird books of the time. The actual specimens which he shot are preserved in the bird skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring, and the ones which were new to science and named after him (known as the species 'types') are important and kept in special storage but their condition is very delicate, which is not surprising considering how old they are.


The painting by Jameson is of a male Superb sunbird, an incredibly beautiful bird with irridescent feathers that catch the light. Jameson shot a number of them and my painting above is of four specimens which survived the journey back to England, including two birds he painted, which are the second (female) and fourth (male) from left in my picture.
I have managed to identify all but one of the birds which Jameson painted in his journals (see list below) and have tracked down most of the actual specimens which he collected. What can we say about James Jameson as a naturalist from this material? After his death there does appear to have been a considerable effort made to reposition his reputation as a serious scientist in order to prevent his memory being forever tainted by the story about the killing of the African slave but, truth to tell, although Jameson clearly had a basic curiosity about the natural world and was an avid collector of trophies, he does not seem to have had the application to have been a professional scientist. He was, however, still a young man when he died (on his thirty-second birthday) and there is every possibility that he could have become a very useful amateur ornithologist. After all, he does have three birds named after him, which is three more than the much more famous explorer Stanley managed to achieve.
List of birds painted by James S. Jameson during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition
Jameson painted twenty-five birds in twenty pictures, many of which can be traced to the actual bird skin specimens now in the zoology collections (avian skin collection) of the Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire:
- Collared sunbird (Hedydipna collaris). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 45 (top). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Green sunbird (Anthreptes rectirostris). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 36. Actual specimen not yet located.
- Green-throated sunbird (Chalcomitra rubescens). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 45 (bottom). Actual specimen not yet located.
- Western violet-backed sunbird (Anthreptes longuemarei), male and female. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 27 (male, bottom; female, top). Actual specimens located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Superb sunbird (Cinnyris superba), male. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 168 (male). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Superb sunbird (Cinnyris superba), female. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 171 (female). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- White-throated blue swallow (Hirundo nigrita). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 179. Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Bluebill (Spermaspiza guttata). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, unpaginated, inside front cover. Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Chestnut-breasted nigrita (Nigrita bicolor). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 6 (top). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Antpecker (originally Pholidornis jamesoni, now Parmoptila woodhousei). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 6 (bottom). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring. The bird is now known as Woodhouse's antpecker.
- Jameson's Wattle-eye (Dyaphorophyia jamesoni). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 146. Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Chestnut Wattle-eye (Dyaphorophyia castanea), male and female. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 149 (male, left; female, right). Actual specimens located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- White-spotted flufftail (Corethura pulchra), nestling. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 118 (nestling). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- White-spotted flufftail (Corethura pulchra), adult. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 119 (adult). Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- Rufous-chested swallow (Hirundo senegalensis). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 128. Actual specimen not yet located.
- Lesser Sandplover (Charadris mongolus). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p.131 (mislabelled as a dotterel by the artist). Actual specimen not yet located.
- Black-bellied seed cracker (Pyrenestes ostrinus). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 3. Actual specimen not brought back to England or did not survive journey.
- Reed warbler sp. (?). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 42. Actual specimen not yet located.
- Barred warbler (Sylvia nisoria). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 51. Actual specimen not yet located.
- Great blue turaco (Corythaeola cristata). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 8, unpaginated. Actual specimen not brought back to England or did not survive journey.
- Yellow wagtail (Motacilla flava). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 143. Actual specimen not brought back to England or did not survive journey.
- Brown-chested lapwing (Vanellus superciliosus). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 4, p. 161. Actual specimen located in the avian skin collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
- White-browed scrub robin (Cercotrichas leucophyrs), tail feathers. Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 20 (tail feathers). Actual specimen not yet located.
- White-browed scrub robin (Cercotrichas leucophyrs). Original watercolour painting by James Jameson located in the Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Jameson Papers, Item 5, p. 21. Actual specimen not yet located.
In addition to his paintings of birds, Jameson also painted village scenes and people as well as animals and insects. The Pitt Rivers Museum's Jameson Papers are full of interesting material and include some of the most visually attractive of all the notebooks and journals which were written by any of the European explorers in Africa.
Text and paintings © Marcus Rutherford 2024. Images from Jameson’s papers copyright Pitt Rivers Museum