Adams Library at Rhode Island College Owen Jones Exhibit

ORNAMENT and COLOR

An exhibition on the third (main) floor of the James P. Adams Library throughout the month of July, 2008



2006 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament of 1856. This chromolithographed bible of ornament of all known styles and ages of ornament became the chief reference work in the offices of architects, interior designers and industrial designers in Europe and America until ornament was banished by the Modern Movement in the twentieth century. The color of architecture was of particular interest to architects in the early nineteenth century. Owen Jones developed a theory of primary colors governed by the “neutralization” of the primaries in the proportions of 8 blue, 5 red, and 3 yellow according to the research of his friend the chemist George Field*. Jones went on to transcend his own color theories of the 1840s and 1850s with original coloration for interiors in the 1860s and 1870s, anticipating the effects of pointillisme and the complementary colors of Otto Hering by several decades. “Colour is the soul of architecture” Jones said, and ornamental fields the best means for distributing that color in the object or building.

This exhibition looks at some of the influences on Jones, and some of the influences of Jones’ Grammar on his own work and on subsequent authors of pattern books during a fifty year span from 1844-1895. The exhibit is also a small history of chromolithographic printing which helped to revolutionize the nineteenth century’s sense of object and interior, architecture and place, and atmosphere and nature.


Kresten Jespersen, Ph.D.




*For George Field’s Chromatography, or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20915








Chromolithography and the printing of the Grammar.




Chromolithography (colored lithography) and lithography both rely on the chemical antipathy between oil and water. The lithographic process was discovered in 1796 by Alois Senefelder whose book History of Lithography (1819) was in Owen Jones’ library. Water-absorbent limestone is specially prepared and made flat and smooth. Chromolithography is a planometric or flat printing process – image and non-image areas exist in the same two-dimensional surface. A special fatty and greasy black ink is painted onto the water-absorbing limestone surface. The non-image parts of the plate are treated with gum arabic after being moistened with water. The oily ink adhers only to the greasy image areas and is repelled by the water-saturated areas. The stone is then covered by paper and a scraper is drawn across the paper by a special steam press.
George Audsley, a designer and writer of fine chromolithographed books wrote on this process in his The Art of Chromolithography (1883) and described how the 1st folio edition of the Grammar probably was reduced to a quarto by means of specially prepared india rubber stretched across the original key-line drawing and then shrunk to the required size. The Grammar was prepared with about 20 tons of stone, some 700 stones in all, each with one color, averaging 7 colors to each plate. Each stone carried the all-important registration mark and was prepared one color at a time, working from the lightest to the darkest color. The last of the Quaritch editions of the Grammar was in 1928, at the end of the run for the chromolithographic process. It was replaced by offset printing about 1930, but never surpassed.

Sources:

George Audsley, The Art of Chromolithography. London: Sampson Low, 1883.

Joan M. Friedman, Color Printing in England, 1486-1876: An Exhibition, Yale Center for British Art. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1978.

David Pankow, “Chromolithography,” Owen Jones. The Grammar of Ornament, CD-ROM, Palo Alto, CA: Octavo, 1998. I have relied extensively on Pankow for this brief overview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromolithography







JONES, Owen (1809-1874). The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones. Illustrated by examples from various styles of ornament. London: Day and Son, 1856. 1st ed. Imperial folio (22 1/2 “ x 15”). Letterpress title in red and black with wood-engraved vignette. Additional chromolithographed title and 100 chromolithographed plates drawn on stone by Frances Bedford comprising about 2,350 ornaments together with numerous wood-engraved illustrations. Brown half calf over brown cloth-covered boards, gilt lettered black leather spine label, rebacked with new headbands.

This is the most famous of the pattern books of the nineteenth century and universally regarded as the classic reference work for ornament in offices of architects, interior designers and industrial designers until the International Style brought ornament to an end. The Grammar was the first encyclopedia of all styles of ornament from the Stone Age to the seventeenth century, from The South Seas to Burma. While Japanese ornament was not included, it was heavily weighted toward the oriental styles of ornament. A new progressive Victorian aesthetic based on nature and the 37 propositions of ornament following the Preface is one of the great achievements of the Grammar. Every ornament chosen by Jones in this folio demonstrates the eternal principles which govern all good design and have their source in nature.



JONES, Owen (1809-1874). The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones. Illustrated by examples from various styles of ornament. London: Day and Son, 1865. 2nd ed. Super royal quarto (13 ½” x 9 ½”). Additional chromolithographed title and 112 chromolithographed plates drawn on stone by Frances Bedford comprising about 2,350 ornaments together with numerous wood-engraved illustrations. Purple cloth binding, cover sunned.

The first edition was large and expensive at twenty guineas, so when the Grammar went to press again, a more inexpensive quarto priced at five guineas was chosen as the format. Every plate of the first edition was redrawn by Frances Bedford to fit this smaller size, but no expense was spared to make it as accurate and architectural as the 1856 folio. All lines in the second edition were ruler and compass drawn, unlike the subsequent third edition by Bernard Quaritch which, while being more saturated in color, was hand drawn with many mis-registrations and even unintended ornaments. Most republications of the Grammar starting in 1972 were based on the Quaritch editions of 1868 or 1910 and have given a false impression of this quarto. George Eliot, a close friend of Owen Jones, reviewed this edition for the Fortnightly Review (May 15, 1865) and called attention to Jones’ elevation of interior design from a trade to the province of architecture. The second edition was translated into French and German.






JONES, Owen (1809-1874). The History of Joseph and his Brethren. Genesis Chapters XXXVII. XXVIII. XL. London: Day and Son, [1865]. Demy quarto (11 ½” x 8 ½”). Illuminated designs by Owen Jones with figures by Henry Warren, and executed on stone by Albert Warren. Red pebbled cloth, beveled boards, extra gilt, all edges gilt (aeg), unpaginated.


Thirty years before this publication Owen Jones had traveled down the Nile with his French friend Jules Goury in search of Egyptian polychromatic ornament. The decoration of the plates and text of this book reflect a perfect understanding of this ancient ornament. Ruari McLean writes that "Jones is exploiting the new medium of chromolithography to the full, and, since even the text is drawn, his pages owe nothing to the traditions of book design which are based on engraving: but since the text is drawn to imitate the regularity of type, there is no obvious link with the manuscript tradition either. Here is a new conception of book design, which prefigures the Kelmscott openings of thirty years later. (McLean , Victorian Book Design, pp. 128-9)



JONES, Owen (1809-1874). Paradise and the Peri. Tho[ma]s Moore. London: Day and Son, [1860]. Super royal quarto (13 ¼ x 9 ½”). Illuminated designs by Owen Jones with figures by Henry Warren, and executed on stone by Albert Warren. Brown grained cloth, beveled boards, extra gilt, all edges gilt (aeg), [54] pages.


This illustrated poem by Thomas Moore, in the spirit of the Sufi poets of Persia, is an example of the orientalizing Victorian aesthetic of Owen Jones. The plates are original ornament in the Persian style and Albert Warren has drawn the text “type” on stone together with the ornaments of Jones and the figural compositions of his father, Henry Warren. Through his involvement with the South Kensington Museum and the Schools of Design, for which the Grammar was an essential text, Owen Jones had a strong influence on the Arts and crafts movement in general, and on William Morris in particular. The total integration of both text and illustration in the Kelmscott books by Morris is prefigured in these illuminated treasures of graphic arts by Owen Jones.





JONES, Owen (1809-1874). Ancient Spanish Ballads; Historical and Romantic. Translated by J.G. Lockhart. London: John Murray, 1841. Quarto (9 ¾” x 8”). Ornaments by Owen Jones in the Moorish style. Red pebbled cloth, extra gilt, all edges gilt (aeg), unpaginated.


The colored titles, borders, and ornamental letters and vignettes are by Owen jones in this, one of his earliest contributions to the book arts. Jones also designed two of the steel engravings in this text, one of which was on the architecture of the Alhambra, the other a early collaboration with Henry Warren. At the time of this publication, Jones had just about finished the first volume of his two volumes on the Alhambra, 1836-1845, which was entirely chromolithographed by Owen Jones in his own studio. Spanish Ballads is an early venture into original Moorish ornament and the first of more than forty publications illustrated in part or wholly by Owen Jones during his lifetime.



JONES, Owen (1809-1874). Gray’s Elegy. London: Longman and Co.; New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. Royal octavo (9 ¾” x 6 ¾”). Illuminated by Owen Jones in the Medieval style. Pressed leather “relievo” binding with beveled edges. Edges of binding gilt, all edges gilt (aeg), perfect binding, [36] ill. p.

Ruari Mclean says that Gray’s Elegy is: the first secular book illustrated wholly by Owen Jones; the first book by Owen Jones with both a London and a New York publisher; and, the first “relievo” binding by Remnant & Edmonds who were known for their specialty bindings. The Medieval-like illuminations are in the primary colors: two blues, two reds, gold (yellow) and black and are an application of Jones’ theory of the effect of certain proportions of primaries. He was to use this theory on a grand scale in his coloration of Joseph Paxton’s iron-and-glass Great Exhibition of 1851. The ornaments in Gray’s Elegy are entirely original and reflect the widespread popularity of Pugin’s Gothic Revival so visible since his decoration of the Houses of Parliament in the 1840s.



JONES, Owen (1809-1874). The Illuminated Calendar and Home Diary for 1845. Copied from the Hours of Anne of Brittany of 1499 (?). London, Longman and Co., 1845. Imperial octavo (11” x 7 ½”). Illuminated by Owen Jones and Noel Humphreys. Half leather over cloth covered boards. All edges gilt (aeg), unpaginated.

Owen Jones and Noel Humphrey, the antiquarian and medievalist, brought out two Illuminated Calendars, this one in 1845, and another in 1846. They were both chromolithographed, a technique for lithographic coloration on stone pioneered in England by Owen Jones at his own expense for his publication of the Alhambra, 1836-1845. With this publication, we see an example of Jones’ eclectic, catholic and universal taste in ornament, in this case late medieval naturalism. What was based on a luxury object some 450 years earlier has now become in Victorian times an everyday object for popular consumption.






JONES, Owen (1809-1874). Examples of Chinese Ornament. Selected from Objects in the South Kensingon Museum and other Collections. London: S. & T. Gilbert, 1867. Super royal quarto (13 ¼” x 9 ½”). Letterpress title in red and black. Additional chromolithographed title and 100 chromolithographed plates drawn on stone. Three-quarter bound leather, spine title in gilt, marbled boards, all edges gilt (aeg), 15 pp. text.

This is probably the most beautiful pattern book produced by Jones. It is all his own work, unlike the Grammar which was a collaboration. In his Examples he reevaluates the quality of Chinese ornament which he had considered inferior in the Grammar. The Taiping Rebellion of 1851-1864 and the two Opium Wars brought an influx of significant Chinese objects to Great Britain. Collectors in Jones’ circle such as Alfred Morrison of Fonthill, Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, the printer Col. De la Rue, Thomas Chapell the music seller, and F.O. Ward acquired collections of Chinese art. The South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, for which Owen Jones selected objects together with A.W.N. Pugin following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, is the source of many of the ornaments in this publication.



PUGIN, Augustus Welby Northcote (1812-1852). Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume... Enlarged and Revised by the Rev. Bernard Smith. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846. 2nd ed. Royal quarto (12 ½” x 10”). xvi. 245pp, 73 chromolithograph plates (2 double page; including dupe no.29) & 1 uncolored; b/w illus. throughout the text. Original green half leather, pebbled cloth over boards, gilt spine title, all edges gilt (aeg).

One of the most influential pattern books of the Gothic Revival, the first edition was published in 1844. Pugin’s collaborator, the Rev. Smith, had been an Anglican priest but under Pugin’s influence, converted to Roman Catholicism. The elaborate chromolithograph plates are printed with gold and several highly saturated colors. “Pugin’s remarks about universal principles of art in his introduction to The Glossary were widely read, and influenced the development of a functional approach to design…” (Alice Beckwith, Victorian Bibliomania, p.56). This work “supplied architect and cleric alike with a dazzling selection of archaeologically correct Gothic ornament. It was among the earliest of British books to be lithographed in colour...” (Durant, Ornament, p.87). “One of the outstanding colour books of the Victorian period” “even richer in colour than The Alhambra (by Owen Jones), and a bit easier to handle....This is one of the outstanding colour books of the Victorian period” (McLean, Victorian Book Design, p.115).





RACINET, Auguste (1825-1893). L’Ornement Polychrome. Paris: Fermin-Didot et Cie, [1885], 3rd. ed., 1st and 2nd series, 2 vols. Large post folio (16 ½” x 11 ½”). 220 chromolithographed plates with gold and silver. Three quarter bound red leather on marbleized boards, gilt title on spine, all edges gilt (aeg).

Racinet’s treatise was first published in 1869, and clearly surpassed visually Jones’ Grammar but did not attempt Jones’ integrated statement of theory. A second volume was published in 1883. Celebrated works by Prisse D’Avennes, La Décoration Arabe, 1885 and by N. Simakoff, L’Art de l’Asie Centrale were inspired by both Jones and Racinet, and all these together constitute a Golden Age of chromolithography and scholarship. A book seller has described Racinet and his publisher Didot with unusual excellence as follows: “Monsieur Charles Auguste Albert Racinet was born in Paris on July 20th, 1825. His career was representative of a group of 19th-century industrial draughtsmen, teachers of technical drawing and factory studio managers who helped diffuse the most significant motifs of the decorative arts of the time. Like many of these men, Racinet learned his trade from his father, also christened Charles Auguste Racinet, who was a lithographic printer. The great publisher Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1790-1876) was a distinguished Hellenist, elected member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and a collector of manuscripts and rare books. Ambroise Didot published a series of archeological works on Egypt, Greece, Pompeii, and so on, to which Racinet constantly refers. These were the principle sources of the L'Ornement Polychrome, the practical collection put together with the avowed intention of ‘rendering major services to our industrial arts.’ Racinet belonged to the generation trained by neo-classical artists in the orbit of Percier and Fontaine, influenced by the Schinkel tendency and supported by architects such as Hittorf and later Voillet-le-Duc.” (Printers Row Fine and Rare Books, Chicago, IL)



DOLMETSCH, H[einrich], (1846-1908). Ornamental Treasures: A Collection of Designs from India, China, Japan, Italy, France, Germany etc. of all Styles and Times. London, A.W. Cowan, [after 1889], printed by J. Hoffmann, Stuttgart, Germany. Folio (13 ¾” x 9 ½”). Half leather, diapered cloth on boards, gilt title on spine.


Between 1886-1889 Heinrich Dolmetsch published his Ornamentenschatz with Julius Hoffmann of Stuttgart. An English translation had several editions in England, this one by Cowan and another by B.T. Batsford, as well as several editions in the United States by R. Davis and by B. Hessling, and again by Hessling and Spielmeyer in 1890. Durant (Ornament, p. 15) cites Dolmetsch’s chromolithographed pattern book as a descendant of Jones’ Grammar. While the material is new, the presentation and layout follows Jones’ and Racinet’s earlier publications.





PAGES CHANGED DAILY
FOR THIS EXHIBIT