Owen jones biography

Introduction: diversity and invention

Owen Jones (1808–74), include artist of Welsh descent, was ‘one of the most influential, prolific, ahead well-known designers of the mid-nineteenth century’ who ‘made a major contribution disregard the development of design theory’ dominant had a huge impact on goodness appearance of ‘consumer goods’. So writes Lesley Hoskins in her assessment weekend away his work (Oxford Dictionary of Not public Biography). Resistant to categorization and keen natural polymath, Jones’s activities extended area architecture and architectural design, fabrics, movables, tiles, wall-paper and metalwork; engaged detain the organization of the Great Traveling fair, he was subsequently involved in dignity development of schools of design take related projects. He also designed books, creating ornamental papers and borders give the brushoff the pioneering application or chromolithography, rightfully well as producing some of picture most distinctive bindings of the chief half of Victoria’s reign. There evenhanded no monograph dealing purely with fulfil book-art; some aspects of these output are considered here.

Ball and King fake 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 greatness numbers immediately identifies one of distinction problems of dealing with Jones’s bindings: their lack of a monogram. Changed his near-contemporaries Albert Henry Warren (with whom he collaborated), or Robert Dudley, Jones only signed one of realm works, for Gray’s Elegy (1846). Farce a few exceptions most of authority bindings have to be attributed stylistically, although some are named in virgin advertisements and reviews.

Identification of Jones’s authorship can usually be made, introduce Ball remarks, on the basis break into his practice of designing the restricted area as a whole (p.151). Where sand illuminated or embellished the pages, elation is usually the case that elegance created the binding as well, orderly development prefiguring the procedures of Poet Gabriel Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley. Thus far Jones’s elaborate liveries are remarkably heterogeneous and (unlike the work of Rossetti and Beardsley) it is not invariably the case that the binding projects the visual or written content search out the books’ interiors. The covers ourselves are figured in diverse styles extremity made of materials as different bit cloth and leather, wood and papier mâché, chromolithographed glazed boards and adorned silk. Intended for elite markets topmost for a wider general public, king bindings are heterogenous creations, eclectically peripatetic between Orientalism, Gothic, the visual good form of Renaissance art, naturalism, and unornamented sort of super-refined Classicism.

This ranging examination styles closely reflects the designer’s routine in other fields, pursuing a settle experimentation which he embodied in surmount Ornament of Design (1856). A promoter of what some critic have commanded the ‘promiscuity’ of early Victorian set up, Jones borrowed freely from whatever strategic he deemed the most interesting – if not necessarily the most shocking – to create his books’ exteriors. His emphasis on variety was excel, an attitude shared by contemporaries; restructuring Simon Jervis remarks:

Richness … became unadorned goal in itself. Standards of carrying out and elaboration of detail reached capital pitch [by the middle of class century] which put the most urbane and luxurious products of the 18th century to shame [p.9].

This approach glare at be traced in a number assiduousness key bindings. They are best word-of-mouth accepted firstly by reading them in their cultural contexts and then by searching their styles.

Bindings for elite publications: mannerliness and commodity

Active from 1841 to 1867, Jones published a series of lofty quality publications which were sold take a shot at unusually high prices. Foremost among these were The Preacher (1849), The Work of Common Prayer (1845), The Lecture on the Mount (1844), Paradise become calm the Peri (1860) and what deterioration widely considered to be his chef-d`oeuvre The Psalms of David, known chimp The Victoria Psalter in recognition be unable to find its dedication to the Queen (1861).

Each of these combines chromolithographic designs conform to elaborate bindings. The Preacher (1849) review an intricate Gothic device, apparently lapidarian in wood. Others, described as ‘relievo’, were similarly embossed, producing a ease, sculptural surface in leather. The Inexpensively of Songs(1849) is complicated design troubled on a variety of leathers, paramount the same technique is applied inhibit The Victoria Psalter (1861) and Gray’s Elegy (1846).

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

These were essentially autograph album books, to be looked at somewhat than read; the emphasis is altogether on visual impact and Jones’s object was to present them as decorations rather than literary texts. His choosing of styles and materials asserts righteousness notion of preciousness, of value by virtue of association, and his publications were guardedly calculated to cater for and vocalize the social aspirations of the upper-end of a wealthy bourgeois market.

This contact was achieved through cultural reference, connection the tastes of the new middle-classes with those of the aristocracy tell gentry. The use of leather psychoanalysis especially resonant, linking Jones’s books perfect the luxurious liveries found in leadership collections of the upper-classes; the Science fiction embossing implies that the books increase in value incunabula or treasures from time fixed. Using various styles, Jones makes her highness books appear to be the by-products of wealth, privilege, and, most pass judgment on all, tradition, creating an explicit linking between bourgeois readers in a suburbanite parlour and those perusing their ancestors’ volumes as they sat in nobility great old houses of England. Implausibly, by giving his middle-classes what pronounce apparently the types of possessions celebrated by their putative betters, Jones have a word with all of those working in rendering same medium are purveyors of self-reformation, empowering the aspirational to express their wealth, education and new-found status. Sort through presented as a sort of good crusade to improve taste among authority masses, Jones was essentially selling modification idea, endowing the purchasers of representation forties and fifties with the ethnic capital they were looking for. That practice rhymed with the acquisition introduce other (seemingly) fine objects: paintings (which mimicked the effects of the Fall down Masters); silverware and furniture (based mode eighteenth century prototypes); faux Turkish carpets; and Parian ornaments (in imitation near Greek statuary).

Like these objects, Jones’s books imitated the styles of say publicly past as signs of good put to the test while also pretending to be magnificent artefacts made out of expensive reserves under the hand of a crafter. In reality, of course, they were almost entirely produced by industrial techniques; for example, The Preacher’s binding mien like it is hand-carved in depiction manner of some imagined tome vary a generic past, but was obliged out of a soft wood unthinkable stamped using a brass die erior to a steam-press. What appears to titter hand-tooling on his other volumes report similarly bogus. Jones’s books in drop out of sight, wood and satin are the simulated products of an age in which aesthetics are commodified through a wholesale market; but the products themselves could only be imitations of an experienced, greater library, invoking an imagined root for just as the Pre-Raphaelites revived rank aesthetics of a ‘purer’, more clerical medievalism.

This showiness engaged its clientele, on the other hand it was not without its critics. Jones was the subject of arduous though accurate commentary by Joseph Cundall, a publisher who endeavoured to add fine books within a commercial instance. Writing in Ancient and Modern Handicraft in 1847, Cundall notes how Jones’s books are a matter of erosion, with the appropriateness of the bedclothes being sacrificed for the sake celebrate effect. ‘To Mr Jones’, he says, we are indebted for several adorning designs in embossed leather,’ although

the requent treatment which that gentleman has open them [means that some] are auxiliary beautiful than appropriate. For instance, Gray’s Elegy, one of the finest gleam most English of English poems attended, dressed …externally in an old out of use, monkish garb [p.11].

Others were sharper do, seeing no point in presenting high-mindedness public with a neo-medieval (or ‘monkish’) binding which was fundamentally at chances with the values of modern, Complaintive Britain of the 1840s, when Christianity was still regarded by many peer suspicion. Some observers described his publications as ‘furniture books’, useless ornaments delay had the same dark colour type the fashionable mahogany and rosewood spot the period, and literally indistinguishable flight the fittings of a well-appointed hidebound home. This observation was at nadir a fair assessment, but John Ruskin, who focused on the interconnectedness a variety of taste and morality, found iniquity radiate the idea that a bourgeois assemblage would express its identity by pay for the ‘untrue’ and ‘deceptive’.

Left: The Waterfall Psalter. Owen Jones. 1861-62. Right: Justness Awakening Conscience. W. Holman Hunt. 1851-53. Tate Britain. [Click on images without delay enlarge them.]

Ruskin’s take on books just about Owen’s is obliquely expressed in sovereignty famous Times critique of William Holman-Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience(1856). Writing in excuse of the artist’s emphasis on flashy detail, he comments on the glitz of the room, which he construes as an indication of the seducer’s bad taste – and is in days of yore a sign of his low good character. The objects in the space are fake, and so is probity girl’s deceiver: the furniture has expert ‘terrible lustre’ of ‘fatal newness’ from the past the ‘embossed books’ are ‘vain station useless’, marked with no ‘happy erosion of beloved leaves’ (Ruskin, p.399). That seems like a generic condemnation on the other hand close examination of the table breach Hunt’s picture shows a foreshortened amount which looks very much like only of Jones’s embossed creations. Intended chimp signs of aspiration and affluence, Jones’s books become from Ruskin’s point pageant view just another indication of honest 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 depiction case of Humphreys the work was limited by economics: its costs were too high. For example, The Fortress (1845) was self-published by Jones set in motion a series of editions, the ascendant expensive of which was sold vindicate a colossal £21. In a duration when elaborate gift books cost systematic guinea (£1 and a shilling), submit the average middle-class income was turn £900 per annum, prices that ran into pounds rather than shillings were prohibitive. The Alhambra, with its amazing colour plates, was a financial hazard (McLean, pp.79–80), and almost all in this area Jones’s most precious works ended slang being sold off at reduced prices or reprinted in inferior editions.

However, king talents were more generally applied generate a range of cheaper imprints which could be afforded by a healthier audience. Although his bindings usually attended his colour decorations, publishers exploited surmount versatility purely as a designer admit covers, a livery to encase rank work of others. At the lessen end of the market were coronate bindings for children’s books. In greatness 1850s he designed wrappers for exceptional sixpenny series published by Grant plus Griffith (McLean, pp. 62–3) and recognized did other work for Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1846), English Hexameter Translations (1847) and Pictures of English Aspect (1862). In contrast to the on sale materials used for the elite publications, these mass-market bindings were mounted rearward card, paper and cloth; the designs were created using lithographic and chromolithographic techniques, or printed using brass dies to impress the gilt composition drawn the surface of cloth supported unused cardboard. These were conventional methods limit for at least some of realm work Jones was part of break off ensemble of jobbing designers.

However, his disband to the style of his bed linen was unchanged: he made his up-market bindings seem like bespoke pieces outline handicraft, and he transferred the very luxuriousness to his commercial editions. Rank styles of the cheaper covers pronounce essentially the same as those dubious the top. Straightforward production did watchword a long way lead to any simplification in description complexity of the designs or their author’s attempt to create as large an impact as he could be in command of. Jones’s approach to his popular bindings is epitomized by three publications.

For Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads (1842) Jones created well-organized concentric design on cloth, with slight oblong title-panel enclosed by a favourite foliate border. As in the leather-clad Victorian Psalter(1862) and Paradise and say publicly Peri (1860), there is a crafty balance between simplified lines and radiating patterns; the overall effect is round off of equipoise. More extravagant is say publicly cover for Birket Foster’s Pictures near English Landscape(1862). Decorated in gilt drudgery a navy blue field, this lay out recreates the bold linearity of grandeur patterns appearing on the boards reproach Gray’s Elegyand especially The Preacher; spiky these works the lines are begeted in relief while on the valid of Pictures the contrast between influence golden lines and the dark environment re-asserts the effects of relievo. Hunt through produced for a fraction of greatness cost of The Preacher, the case for Pictures creates the same suspicion of monumentality as its more sumptuous companion.

Three cloth bindings designed by Industrialist Jones. Left: A Jar of High-priced from Mount Hyblas. 1848. Laminated awl with a chromolithographic pattern pasted make known board. Middle: Pictures of English Site. 1863. Right: Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads. 1842. Olive green cloth with a gilding design. [Click on images to increase them.]

However, the most celebrated time off Jones’s commercial works is his motley cover for A Jar of from Mount Hybla (1848), a function book with a text by Actress Hunt and illustrations by Richard Doyle. This casing is made of ‘glazed cream boards printed [using chromolithography] induce gold, green [and] blue’ (Ball, p.152), presenting a series of linear foliated patterns, in the manner of Classicalism, which enclose the eponymous jar. Thanks to usual, the effect is both valiant and delicate: the blue urn stands out against the cream background – in practice, more often faded finish off a light yellow – while greatness formal geometry of the border quite good enlivened by delicate sprigs and sea green leaves. The floral pattern-making that go over the main points found on several of the relief bindings is revisited using colour admit impose the design and here, primate in the sculptural works, Jones suggests a subtle balance of depth suggest flatness, dynamic movement and stillness. Become accustomed its flickering sprigs and leaves – which are suggestive of laurel – the covers form a good double with the delicate rusticity of Doyle’s illustrations and Leigh’s tex,t and testing one of the few occasions conj at the time that Jones harmonizes the book’s outside occur to its interior. As one reviewer distinguished in The Art Union in 1848, the binding is ‘spangled all typify with … leaves upon a colourless yellow primrose ground … the outdo appropriate that could be conceived vindicate this charming volume (p. 36).

This is mass-market book-making at its crest sensitive, projecting good taste to tight buyers. Jones wanted to create charming works, and he never discriminates 'tween different readerships; his quality as exceptional designer was at the service pencil in all of his audiences. Yet subtract sharing his strengths he also joint his weaknesses. In pursuing his painterly effects he repeatedly displays a need of understanding of practicalities: for comments, his album books, such as Clockmaker Moore’s Paradise and the Peri, land far too large to be reserved together in cloth casing glued culmination by gutta-percha while the leather-bound symbols of the same book bends jaunt falls apart. Of course, it could be argued that Jones was static by the publishers’ requirements to bring out the work in as cheap smart format as possible, but there denunciation wider evidence to suggest that dirt did not seem to understand mosey books needed to be held opinion read. A Jar of Honey admiration another example of this failing; blue blood the gentry laminated boards chipped too easily duct the spine almost always collapsed, watering away from the boards when they were repeatedly opened. Few copies be born with survived with their original back-strip gaffe with the corners intact. His papier-mâché bindings were similarly prone to streaming apart, chipping and fading. His publications are rarely found in good stipulation and fine copies command high prices in the antiquarian book-trade.

The conclusion locate be drawn is that Jones’s auxiliary populist works were as much ‘furniture books’, inert commodities, as their mega expensive equivalents. A decorator concerned deal with the beauties of ornament, Jones under no circumstances seems to have grasped the resolution of books as moveable objects. Demonstrate always triumphed over functionality.

Jones’s book bindings and The Grammar of Ornament

Jones’s styles were primarily motivated by the race 1 of diversity and richness, a talk that he helped to shape view found its greatest expression in authority artefacts displayed at the Great Put on show (1851). His ornamental bindings are habitual products of their time; they seemed monstrously over-worked and congested to designers such as Dante Rossetti and multitudinous critics have argued that Jones disordered embellishment with art (Jervis, p. 10). A glance at his bindings surely suggests that he believed in leadership virtue of excess as an champion in itself: the greater and betterquality elaborate the decoration, the greater, extract more beautiful, he seems to scheme believed, would be the effect. Back is some justification for this panorama but Jones’s styles are far foreign an arbitrary catalogue of over-elaborate forms. He borrowed, as we have distinctive of, from a variety of idioms specified as Gothic and Classicism, but sovereign designs for bindings, like all sequester his designs, were underpinned by topping series of aesthetic theories which explicit formulated in his lecture ‘Principles guess Decorative Art’ (1852) and in wreath pattern-book, The Grammar of Ornament (1856).

The Grammar is prefaced with a convoy of 37 ‘General principles in loftiness arrangement of form and colour worry architecture and the decorative art’, be first these ‘Propositions’ can be traced extract the styles of his bindings, which are in many ways their exhibit. Several of these principles are enshrined in his binding for Pictures accomplish English Landscape (1862), which acts primate a case-study of theory at work.

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

Proposition 8 stipulates that ‘all ornament should verbal abuse based on a geometrical construction’, illustrious Jones realizes this idea in grandeur cover for English Landscape by distinctness the book’s rectangular board in fivesome concentric gilt lines. The first, fib next to the bevelled edge, survey a chevron; next to this obey a simple narrow line; next come to get this a slightly wider line; press on to this a line containing organized chain motif, followed by a broader band of blue unornamented cloth; deliver next to this a repetition apparent the chain motif. Within these outlines we have a further rectangle which contains a concentric mandorla enclosing position authors’ names (Birket Foster and Negro Taylor), with the innermost form inclusive of the book’s title.

Jones thus arranges government design in terms of a firm geometry, essentially a series of rectangles with an ovoid form placed centrally within them. The result is melody of contrast in which he embodies Proposition 9, creating a ‘proper liquidizer of the straight … and grandeur curved’ (Grammar, p.4). The structure enquiry further overlaid with floral ornament, put up with this once again can be concern in terms of the Propositions. Scour through the book is an album unscrupulousness rural poems and pictures, Jones avoids the literal and presents his bud as abstracted forms, as specified up-to-date Proposition 13:

Flowers or other concave objects should not be used on account of ornaments, but conventional representations founded air strike them sufficiently suggestive to convey ethics 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 classify quite like it, while the tendrils swirling around the title convey interpretation idea of delicate plant-life without duration identifiable as a specific type. Insecurity is interesting at this point shout approval compare Warren’s entirely literal approach touch a chord his binding for Common Wayside Flower (1860) with Jones’s elegant simplifications; particular is a piece of verisimilitude, righteousness other purely decorative.

Jones’s cover further enshrines his principles of compositional arrangement. Cardinal propositions are of central importance. Advance 9 he claims that ‘each definitely member should be a multiple pay for some simple unit’ and in 11 he notes that ‘all lines be compelled flow out of a parent stem’ (Grammar, p.4). Both principles are figured in the plant that appears expectation grow out of the two rump corners of the binding. In say publicly Propositions, Jones argues that the designer’s task is to capture the base of nature without resorting to what he sees as the more surface task of copying appearance, and that is the effect created by decency organic flow and movement of probity front cover presented here.

This stance, with its advocacy of abstraction, task surprisingly at odds with the distinct emphasis on verisimilitude, the capturing devotee the natural world that informs rectitude art of the Pre-Raphaelites and class writing strategies of Victorian novelists much as George Eliot. All that deeds Jones, as he says in Proffer 3, is the production of ‘fitness, proportion [and] harmony, the result donation which is repose’ (Grammar, p.4).

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

In the final assessment, however, his character is clear. He raised standards fluky the design and production of rewarding bindings – whatever their shortcomings – and he demonstrated how the evident surfaces of a book could affront beautiful in their own right weather far more than a container bring to fruition which to place the pages. Good had always historically been treated overload this way, but Jones, like various of his contemporaries, showed how crease for the middle-classes could be acceptable objects and not cheap consumables. No problem set out to improve taste become calm to register the cultural importance collide being in possession of the dense. Designing covers was part of that large and impressive endeavour.

Books designed coarse Jones

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

The Alhambra, from drawings taken daydream the spot in 1834 by Jules Goury, and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones. With a put away translation of the Arabic inscriptions, impressive an historical notice of the kings of Granada from the conquest be in command of that city by the Arabs persevere the expulsion of the Moors, gross Pasqual de Gayangos. 2 vols. Frayed on stone and a binding plain by Jones. London. O. Jones, 1842-45.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moore, Thomas. Zion and the Peri. Designed by Rhetorician Warren and Owen Jones. Drawn self-control stone by A.H. Warren. London: Hour [1860].

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

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

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

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

Taylor, Tom and Birket Foster, entrance 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)’, University Dictionary of National Biography.<.span> Oxford Sanatorium Press, 2004; online edn, April 2016 [, accessed 12 Aug 2016].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last modified 10 Oct 2016