Groves, Naomi Jackson, 1910-2001 : Naomi Jackson (Groves) was born in Montreal on 10 July 1910, the eldest daughter of the commercial artist H.A.C. Jackson and his wife Coralie Adair. She made her first trip to Europe with her mother in 1923. While attending Montreal West High School, she studied art at the Montreal Art Association and took private art lessons from Harold Beament and Sarah Robertson. She continued her art studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1928-1929 (and in 1936 took lessons from Lilias Torrance Newton at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). She matriculated from Sir George Williams and entered McGill University, graduating with a B.A. in Modern Languages in 1933 and an M.A. in 1935. She returned to Europe in the summers of 1932 (attending summer school in Heidelberg) and 1935 (travelling in Sweden and Denmark) and again in 1936, accompanied by her uncle, the artist A.Y. Jackson, when she undertook research at the Goethe House in Weimar and attended the Universities of Berlin and Munich. She completed her studies at Harvard, earning a doctoral degree in 1950 with a dissertation on the German sculptor and writer Ernst Barlach.
Naomi Jackson had an intermittent career as a teacher of modern languages, lecturing in German at McGill during the 1930s, at Wheaton College in Massachusetts 1940-1942 and at Carleton College in Ottawa 1943-1945. She spent three months in Greenland in 1941 and published an account of her trip in The Geographical Review in 1943. Her paintings from this trip were exhibited in 1942 in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' exhibition, The Three Jacksons, which also featured the work of her father and A.Y. Jackson. After a brief stint as assistant to the Director of the National Gallery of Canada 1942-1943, she spent four years as a volunteer with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, first in Finland 1945-1947 and then in Germany 1947-1949. In 1951, she joined McMaster University as an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and remained there until 1958.
In 1957, Naomi Jackson married Dr. James Walton Groves (1906-1970), a scientist with the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa and an old family friend, who shared an interest in mycology with her father and whose first wife had died in 1956. She had earlier helped to edit The Mushrooms of Eastern Canada and the United States (1951), written by René Pomerleau and illustrated by H.A.C. Jackson, and she and her husband worked together on an unrealized project to publish her father's mushroom diaries. She continued to be interested in the arts and did occasional reviews for Canadian Art, as well as guest lecturing.
When A.Y. Jackson settled in Manotick in 1955, Groves worked with him on his memoirs, A Painter's Country (1958). She began a large project to create an inventory of all of her uncle's artworks and wrote the text for A.Y.'s Canada, illustrated by his pencil drawings and published by Clarke, Irwin in 1968. After A.Y. Jackson's health deteriorated in 1968, she assumed responsibility for the disposition of his paintings and drawings and eventually inherited all his archival records, as well as his copyright. In 1982, Penumbra Press published her edition of his Arctic diary, A.Y. Jackson: The Arctic 1927, beginning her long association with the press and its publisher John Flood. Penumbra published Groves' One Summer in Quebec: A.Y. Jackson 1925 (1988) and Two Jacksons Abroad (2000). Penumbra also published Groves' account of her work with the American Friends Service Committee, Winter into Summer: Lapland Diary 1945-1946 (1989), as well as her translations of the work of the Danish artist and author Jens Rosing, The Sky Hangs Low (1986) and The Unicorn of the Arctic Sea (1998).
Naomi Jackson Groves was widely respected for her scholarship and her philanthropy. She received honorary degrees from McMaster University 1972 and Carleton University 1990 and the Order of Canada 1993. Some of her paintings are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. She died in 2001.
