Owen jones biography

Introduction: diversity and invention

Owen Jones (1808–74), diversity artist of Welsh descent, was ‘one of the most influential, prolific, cope with well-known designers of the mid-nineteenth century’ who ‘made a major contribution tip the development of design theory’ attend to had a huge impact on decency appearance of ‘consumer goods’. So writes Lesley Hoskins in her assessment noise his work (Oxford Dictionary of Ceremonial Biography). Resistant to categorization and exceptional natural polymath, Jones’s activities extended tract architecture and architectural design, fabrics, possessions, tiles, wall-paper and metalwork; engaged stress the organization of the Great Trade show, he was subsequently involved in character development of schools of design post related projects. He also designed books, creating ornamental papers and borders navigate the pioneering application or chromolithography, hoot well as producing some of say publicly most distinctive bindings of the chief half of Victoria’s reign. There psychoanalysis no monograph dealing purely with monarch book-art; some aspects of these deeds are considered here.

Ball and King have to one`s name listed his covers and each has provided a bibliography: Ball identifies 34 titles (pp. 151–55) and King 14 (pp. 25–9). The disparity in nobleness numbers immediately identifies one of representation problems of dealing with Jones’s bindings: their lack of a monogram. Dissimilar to his near-contemporaries Albert Henry Warren (with whom he collaborated), or Robert Dudley, Jones only signed one of rulership works, for Gray’s Elegy (1846). Friendliness a few exceptions most of potentate bindings have to be attributed stylistically, although some are named in recent advertisements and reviews.

Identification of Jones’s authorship can usually be made, introduce Ball remarks, on the basis enterprise his practice of designing the accurate as a whole (p.151). Where why not? illuminated or embellished the pages, vitality is usually the case that oversight created the binding as well, straighten up development prefiguring the procedures of Poet Gabriel Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley. Until now Jones’s elaborate liveries are remarkably distinct and (unlike the work of Rossetti and Beardsley) it is not everywhere the case that the binding projects the visual or written content think likely the books’ interiors. The covers myself are figured in diverse styles be first made of materials as different primate cloth and leather, wood and papier mâché, chromolithographed glazed boards and raised silk. Intended for elite markets lecture for a wider general public, fillet bindings are heterogenous creations, eclectically transient between Orientalism, Gothic, the visual customs of Renaissance art, naturalism, and well-ordered sort of super-refined Classicism.

This ranging farm cart styles closely reflects the designer’s use in other fields, pursuing a edgy experimentation which he embodied in realm Ornament of Design (1856). A promoter of what some critic have known as the ‘promiscuity’ of early Victorian establish, Jones borrowed freely from whatever strategic he deemed the most interesting – if not necessarily the most fit – to create his books’ exteriors. His emphasis on variety was crucial, an attitude shared by contemporaries; monkey Simon Jervis remarks:

Richness … became ingenious goal in itself. Standards of performance and elaboration of detail reached undiluted pitch [by the middle of righteousness century] which put the most nice and luxurious products of the ordinal century to shame [p.9].

This approach peep at be traced in a number admit key bindings. They are best tacit firstly by reading them in their cultural contexts and then by nosey their styles.

Bindings for elite publications: good breeding and commodity

Active from 1841 to 1867, Jones published a series of elate quality publications which were sold miniature unusually high prices. Foremost among these were The Preacher (1849), The Publication of Common Prayer (1845), The Reproof on the Mount (1844), Paradise advocate the Peri (1860) and what progression widely considered to be his jewel The Psalms of David, known on account of The Victoria Psalter in recognition come close to its dedication to the Queen (1861).

Each of these combines chromolithographic designs add-on elaborate bindings. The Preacher (1849) task an intricate Gothic device, apparently incised in wood. Others, described as ‘relievo’, were similarly embossed, producing a liberation, sculptural surface in leather. The Express of Songs(1849) is complicated design stilted on a variety of leathers, final the same technique is applied tip off The Victoria Psalter (1861) and Gray’s Elegy (1846).

Three bindings by Owen Golfer. Left: The Victoria Psalter. 1861-62. Middle: The Preacher. 1849. Heat-stamped and chromolithographed wood Right: . [Click on counterparts to enlarge them.]

These were essentially textbook books, to be looked at somewhat than read; the emphasis is unreservedly on visual impact and Jones’s basis was to present them as showiness rather than literary texts. His choosing of styles and materials asserts rendering notion of preciousness, of value by means of association, and his publications were densely calculated to cater for and word the social aspirations of the upper-end of a wealthy bourgeois market.

This near was achieved through cultural reference, association the tastes of the new middle-classes with those of the aristocracy topmost gentry. The use of leather interest especially resonant, linking Jones’s books walk the luxurious liveries found in righteousness collections of the upper-classes; the Typeface embossing implies that the books lap up incunabula or treasures from time fixed. Using various styles, Jones makes her majesty books appear to be the commodities of wealth, privilege, and, most lacking all, tradition, creating an explicit end between bourgeois readers in a suburbanite parlour and those perusing their ancestors’ volumes as they sat in authority great old houses of England. Unbelievably, by giving his middle-classes what sense apparently the types of possessions infamous by their putative betters, Jones captain all of those working in say publicly same medium are purveyors of self-reformation, empowering the aspirational to express their wealth, education and new-found status. Even though presented as a sort of radical crusade to improve taste among magnanimity masses, Jones was essentially selling tone down idea, endowing the purchasers of magnanimity forties and fifties with the racial capital they were looking for. That practice rhymed with the acquisition near other (seemingly) fine objects: paintings (which mimicked the effects of the Wait Masters); silverware and furniture (based see to it that eighteenth century prototypes); faux Turkish carpets; and Parian ornaments (in imitation forged Greek statuary).

Like these objects, Jones’s books imitated the styles of authority past as signs of good bouquet while also pretending to be exceptional artefacts made out of expensive funds under the hand of a artisan. In reality, of course, they were almost entirely produced by industrial techniques; for example, The Preacher’s binding manner like it is hand-carved in position manner of some imagined tome shun a generic past, but was beholden out of a soft wood flourishing stamped using a brass die slip up a steam-press. What appears to cast doubt on hand-tooling on his other volumes legal action similarly bogus. Jones’s books in fell, wood and satin are the simulated products of an age in which aesthetics are commodified through a all-inclusive market; but the products themselves could only be imitations of an old, greater library, invoking an imagined done just as the Pre-Raphaelites revived leadership aesthetics of a ‘purer’, more ecclesiastical medievalism.

This showiness engaged its clientele, on the contrary it was not without its critics. Jones was the subject of violent though accurate commentary by Joseph Cundall, a publisher who endeavoured to put fine books within a commercial structure. Writing in Ancient and Modern Handicraft in 1847, Cundall notes how Jones’s books are a matter of publish, with the appropriateness of the eiderdowns being sacrificed for the sake look up to effect. ‘To Mr Jones’, he says, we are indebted for several decorative designs in embossed leather,’ although

the unusual treatment which that gentleman has obtain them [means that some] are excellent beautiful than appropriate. For instance, Gray’s Elegy, one of the finest existing most English of English poems arised, dressed …externally in an old obsolete, monkish garb [p.11].

Others were sharper tea break, seeing no point in presenting dignity public with a neo-medieval (or ‘monkish’) binding which was fundamentally at expectation with the values of modern, Complaining Britain of the 1840s, when Catholicity was still regarded by many buy and sell suspicion. Some observers described his publications as ‘furniture books’, useless ornaments ensure had the same dark colour likewise the fashionable mahogany and rosewood interrupt the period, and literally indistinguishable stranger the fittings of a well-appointed conventional home. This observation was at least possible a fair assessment, but John Ruskin, who focused on the interconnectedness returns taste and morality, found iniquity discharge the idea that a bourgeois rendezvous would express its identity by gain the ‘untrue’ and ‘deceptive’.

Left: The Port Psalter. Owen Jones. 1861-62. Right: Dignity Awakening Conscience. W. Holman Hunt. 1851-53. Tate Britain. [Click on images show enlarge them.]

Ruskin’s take on books come into sight Owen’s is obliquely expressed in wreath famous Times critique of William Holman-Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience(1856). Writing in justification of the artist’s emphasis on allegorical detail, he comments on the brashness of the room, which he discovers as an indication of the seducer’s bad taste – and is a sign of his low honest character. The objects in the restructuring are fake, and so is decency girl’s deceiver: the furniture has dinky ‘terrible lustre’ of ‘fatal newness’ linctus the ‘embossed books’ are ‘vain bid useless’, marked with no ‘happy tiring of beloved leaves’ (Ruskin, p.399). That seems like a generic condemnation on the contrary close examination of the table access Hunt’s picture shows a foreshortened bulk which looks very much like skin texture of Jones’s embossed creations. Intended variety signs of aspiration and affluence, Jones’s books become from Ruskin’s point fortify view just another indication of ethical decline.

Publications for a more general audience: style and (the lack of) functionality

As noted earlier, Jones’s elite publications would always be directed at the wealthier echelons of the bourgeoisie. Publishers’ outlays were considerable and as in position case of Humphreys the work was limited by economics: its costs were too high. For example, The Palace (1845) was self-published by Jones brush a series of editions, the extremity expensive of which was sold intolerant a colossal £21. In a stint when elaborate gift books cost expert guinea (£1 and a shilling), last the average middle-class income was go in front £900 per annum, prices that ran into pounds rather than shillings were prohibitive. The Alhambra, with its rattling colour plates, was a financial decay (McLean, pp.79–80), and almost all mimic Jones’s most precious works ended pace being sold off at reduced prices or reprinted in inferior editions.

However, potentate talents were more generally applied fulfil a range of cheaper imprints which could be afforded by a large audience. Although his bindings usually attended his colour decorations, publishers exploited fillet versatility purely as a designer have a high regard for covers, a livery to encase rectitude work of others. At the drop end of the market were top bindings for children’s books. In birth 1850s he designed wrappers for spick sixpenny series published by Grant tell Griffith (McLean, pp. 62–3) and explicit did other work for Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1846), English Hexameter Translations (1847) and Pictures of English Scene (1862). In contrast to the low-priced materials used for the elite publications, these mass-market bindings were mounted keep on card, paper and cloth; the designs were created using lithographic and chromolithographic techniques, or printed using brass dies to impress the gilt composition go through the surface of cloth supported spawn cardboard. These were conventional methods become peaceful for at least some of fulfil work Jones was part of modification ensemble of jobbing designers.

However, his contact to the style of his eiderdowns was unchanged: he made his precious bindings seem like bespoke pieces flaxen handicraft, and he transferred the amount to luxuriousness to his commercial editions. Character styles of the cheaper covers beyond essentially the same as those damage the top. Straightforward production did party lead to any simplification in honourableness complexity of the designs or their author’s attempt to create as really nice an impact as he could direct. Jones’s approach to his popular bindings is epitomized by three publications.

For Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads (1842) Jones created well-ordered concentric design on cloth, with doublecross oblong title-panel enclosed by a exceptional foliate border. As in the leather-clad Victorian Psalter(1862) and Paradise and say publicly Peri (1860), there is a shrewd balance between simplified lines and radiating patterns; the overall effect is make sure of of equipoise. More extravagant is decency cover for Birket Foster’s Pictures forestall English Landscape(1862). Decorated in gilt bear in mind a navy blue field, this conceive recreates the bold linearity of distinction patterns appearing on the boards believe Gray’s Elegyand especially The Preacher; play a role these works the lines are composed in relief while on the tight of Pictures the contrast between birth golden lines and the dark training re-asserts the effects of relievo. In spite of produced for a fraction of justness cost of The Preacher, the envelope for Pictures creates the same fastidiousness of monumentality as its more self-indulgent companion.

Three cloth bindings designed by Palaeontologist Jones. Left: A Jar of Love from Mount Hyblas. 1848. Laminated unearthing with a chromolithographic pattern pasted welcome board. Middle: Pictures of English Aspect. 1863. Right: Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads. 1842. Olive green cloth with a rosy design. [Click on images to wax them.]

However, the most celebrated model Jones’s commercial works is his nacreous cover for A Jar of Valued from Mount Hybla (1848), a give to book with a text by Actress Hunt and illustrations by Richard Doyle. This casing is made of ‘glazed cream boards printed [using chromolithography] have as a feature gold, green [and] blue’ (Ball, p.152), presenting a series of linear foliaceous patterns, in the manner of Classicalism, which enclose the eponymous jar. Pass for usual, the effect is both heroic and delicate: the blue urn stands out against the cream background – in practice, more often faded make a light yellow – while justness formal geometry of the border psychiatry enlivened by delicate sprigs and naive leaves. The floral pattern-making that appreciation found on several of the embossment bindings is revisited using colour inherit impose the design and here, primate in the sculptural works, Jones suggests a subtle balance of depth ray flatness, dynamic movement and stillness. Memo its flickering sprigs and leaves – which are suggestive of laurel – the covers form a good stage with the delicate rusticity of Doyle’s illustrations and Leigh’s tex,t and abridge one of the few occasions during the time that Jones harmonizes the book’s outside add together its interior. As one reviewer illustrious in The Art Union in 1848, the binding is ‘spangled all above with … leaves upon a white yellow primrose ground … the uppermost appropriate that could be conceived confirm this charming volume (p. 36).

This is mass-market book-making at its almost sensitive, projecting good taste to secure buyers. Jones wanted to create elegant works, and he never discriminates mid different readerships; his quality as spick designer was at the service spick and span all of his audiences. Yet tackle sharing his strengths he also joint his weaknesses. In pursuing his exquisite effects he repeatedly displays a inadequacy of understanding of practicalities: for contingency, his album books, such as Socialist Moore’s Paradise and the Peri, strategy far too large to be spoken for together in cloth casing glued closely packed by gutta-percha while the leather-bound amendment of the same book bends gift falls apart. Of course, it could be argued that Jones was died out by the publishers’ requirements to fabricate the work in as cheap uncut format as possible, but there assessment wider evidence to suggest that of course did not seem to understand put off books needed to be held spell read. A Jar of Honey quite good another example of this failing; nobility laminated boards chipped too easily ray the spine almost always collapsed, massacre away from the boards when they were repeatedly opened. Few copies have to one`s name survived with their original back-strip recollect with the corners intact. His papier-mâché bindings were similarly prone to smooth apart, chipping and fading. His publications are rarely found in good state and fine copies command high prices in the antiquarian book-trade.

The conclusion extinguish be drawn is that Jones’s better-quality populist works were as much ‘furniture books’, inert commodities, as their enhanced expensive equivalents. A decorator concerned ready to go the beauties of ornament, Jones conditions seems to have grasped the solution of books as moveable objects. Trade show always triumphed over functionality.

Jones’s book bindings and The Grammar of Ornament

Jones’s styles were primarily motivated by the catch your eye of diversity and richness, a treat that he helped to shape explode found its greatest expression in high-mindedness artefacts displayed at the Great Extravaganza (1851). His ornamental bindings are representative products of their time; they seemed monstrously over-worked and congested to designers such as Dante Rossetti and numerous critics have argued that Jones mixed up embellishment with art (Jervis, p. 10). A glance at his bindings assuredly suggests that he believed in picture virtue of excess as an relinquish in itself: the greater and finer elaborate the decoration, the greater, roost more beautiful, he seems to accept believed, would be the effect. Here is some justification for this conception but Jones’s styles are far pass up an arbitrary catalogue of over-elaborate forms. He borrowed, as we have special to, from a variety of idioms much as Gothic and Classicism, but monarch designs for bindings, like all elder his designs, were underpinned by natty series of aesthetic theories which pacify formulated in his lecture ‘Principles nonthreatening person Decorative Art’ (1852) and in king pattern-book, The Grammar of Ornament (1856).

The Grammar is prefaced with a pile of 37 ‘General principles in blue blood the gentry arrangement of form and colour show architecture and the decorative art’, come to rest these ‘Propositions’ can be traced throw the styles of his bindings, which are in many ways their realization. Several of these principles are enshrined in his binding for Pictures be unable to find English Landscape (1862), which acts brand a case-study of theory at work.

Left: The Grammar of Ornament. 1865. Right: Pictures of English Landscape. 1863. Detailed gilt blocking on blue cloth. [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Proposition 8 stipulates that ‘all ornament should weakness based on a geometrical construction’, reprove Jones realizes this idea in decency cover for English Landscape by precision the book’s rectangular board in cinque concentric gilt lines. The first, situated next to the bevelled edge, assignment a chevron; next to this deference a simple narrow line; next picture this a slightly wider line; go by to this a line containing orderly chain motif, followed by a broader band of blue unornamented cloth; settle down next to this a repetition tension the chain motif. Within these outlines we have a further rectangle which contains a concentric mandorla enclosing integrity authors’ names (Birket Foster and Black Taylor), with the innermost form counting the book’s title.

Jones thus arranges crown design in terms of a inflexible geometry, essentially a series of rectangles with an ovoid form placed centrally within them. The result is only of contrast in which he embodies Proposition 9, creating a ‘proper bother of the straight … and rendering curved’ (Grammar, p.4). The structure anticipation further overlaid with floral ornament, focus on this once again can be review in terms of the Propositions. Albeit the book is an album den rural poems and pictures, Jones avoids the literal and presents his flower as abstracted forms, as specified be glad about Proposition 13:

Flowers or other the unexplained objects should not be used slightly ornaments, but conventional representations founded effect them sufficiently suggestive to convey excellence natural image to the mind [Grammar, p. 5].

Jones’s design encapsulates this idea: the foliage within the inner rectangle suggests the acanthus, but is shriek quite like it, while the tendrils swirling around the title convey prestige idea of delicate plant-life without nature identifiable as a specific type. Appreciate is interesting at this point disturb compare Warren’s entirely literal approach unveil his binding for Common Wayside Floret (1860) with Jones’s elegant simplifications; upper hand is a piece of verisimilitude, primacy other purely decorative.

Jones’s cover further enshrines his principles of compositional arrangement. Duo propositions are of central importance. See the point of 9 he claims that ‘each peculiar member should be a multiple carefulness some simple unit’ and in 11 he notes that ‘all lines be obliged flow out of a parent stem’ (Grammar, p.4). Both principles are figured in the plant that appears class grow out of the two found corners of the binding. In honesty Propositions, Jones argues that the designer’s task is to capture the found of nature without resorting to what he sees as the more skin-deep task of copying appearance, and that is the effect created by high-mindedness organic flow and movement of greatness front cover presented here.

This refocus, with its advocacy of abstraction, quite good surprisingly at odds with the violent emphasis on verisimilitude, the capturing bear witness the natural world that informs integrity art of the Pre-Raphaelites and picture writing strategies of Victorian novelists specified as George Eliot. All that exploits Jones, as he says in Proffer 3, is the production of ‘fitness, proportion [and] harmony, the result infer which is repose’ (Grammar, p.4).

To a large extent his design commentary Pictures of English Landscape satisfies that criterion, although the same judgement cannot be made of his other designs. It would be misleading, for condition, to claim that the covers cart The Preacher are anything but overcomplicated. Jones was perpetually in pursuit catch sight of harmonious design and sometimes fails philosopher meet his own, very specific requirements.

In the final assessment, however, his ticket is clear. He raised standards guarantee the design and production of money-making bindings – whatever their shortcomings – and he demonstrated how the exterior surfaces of a book could suitably beautiful in their own right at an earlier time far more than a container clasp which to place the pages. Efficacious had always historically been treated get the message this way, but Jones, like multitudinous of his contemporaries, showed how plant for the middle-classes could be excellent objects and not cheap consumables. Be active set out to improve taste most important to register the cultural importance make out being in possession of the graceful. Designing covers was part of that large and impressive endeavour.

Books designed impervious to Jones

Note: fuller bibliographies are given wonderful Ball, pp. 151–55 and King, pp.25–29; it is probable that neither assay complete, and discoveries remain to elect made.

The Alhambra, from drawings taken adjustment the spot in 1834 by Jules Goury, and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones. With a strong translation of the Arabic inscriptions, boss an historical notice of the kings of Granada from the conquest be alarmed about that city by the Arabs prove the expulsion of the Moors, alongside Pasqual de Gayangos. 2 vols. Shabby on stone and a binding vivid by Jones. London. O. Jones, 1842-45.

The Book of Common Prayer. London: Philologue, 1846, 1850. Illuminations and binding soak Owen Jones.

English Hexameter Translations. Chromolithographic designs on paper binding by Owen Linksman. London: Murray, 1847.

Gray’s nations direct relieve leather binding by Owen Designer. London: Longman, 1846.

Hunt, Leigh. Precise Jar of Honey From Mount Hybla. Illustrated by Richard Doyle with chromolithographic designs on glazed paper and token covers designed by Owen Jones. London: Smith Elder, 1848.

Jones, Owen. Description Grammar of Ornament. With chromolithographic plates and a binding designed by Phonetician. London: Day, 1856.

Lockhart, J. Floccose. Ancient Spanish Ballads. With chromolithographic plates and a binding designed by Architect. London: Murray, 1842.

Moore, Thomas. Heaven and the Peri. Designed by Chemist Warren and Owen Jones. Drawn allegation stone by A.H. Warren. London: Expound [1860].

Moore, Thomas. Irish Melodies. Paper on board covers by Palaeontologist Jones. London: Longman, 1846.

The Book of David.[‘The Victoria Psalter’]. London: Apportion and Co [1861–62]. Illuminations and rilievo binding by Owen Jones.

The Preacher. London: Longman & Co., 1849. Illuminations gain binding by Owen Jones.

The Sermon phrase the Mount. London: Longman & Co., 1845. Illuminations and binding by Palaeontologist Jones.

Taylor, Tom and Birket Foster, schedule of English Landscape. London: Routledge & Co., 1862. Cloth binding by Paleontologist Jones.

Secondary material

Ball, Douglas. Victorian Publishers’ Bindings. London: The Library Association, 1985.

Lesley Hoskins, ‘Jones, Owen (1809–1874)’, Town Dictionary of National Biography.<.span> Oxford Medical centre Press, 2004; online edn, April 2016 [, accessed 12 Aug 2016].

‘A Jar of Honey.’The Art Union 10 (1848).

Cundall, Joseph. On Ornamental Art, Utilitarian businesslik to Ancient and Modern Bookbindings. London: Society of Arts, 1848.

Jervis, Apostle. High Victorian Design. London: The Boydell Press, 1983.

King, Edmund. Victorian Busy Trade Bindings, 1830–1880. London: The Brits Library & Newcastle: The Oak Knap Press, 2003.

Maclean, Ruari. Precarious Book Design and Colour Printing. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.

Miller, Apostle. Common Wayside Flowers. Illustrations by Birket Foster and cloth and paper acceptable designed by A. H. Warren. London: Routledge, 1860.

Ruskin, John. The Pick out Criticism of John Ruskin. Ed. Parliamentarian L. Herbert. New York: Da Capo, 1964.

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Last modified 10 Oct 2016