Few people born in the last hundred years will have heard of Owen Jones, the master Victorian architect and designer. Yet, in his lifetime, he ranked alongside Pugin (his collaborator), Morris (his protégé) and Ruskin (his archrival) as one of the leading theorists on the kind of buildings Britain needed. Even the 1911 Britannica, which gave so much space to so many eminent persons, summarised Jones in less than two hundred and fifty words, so quickly was he forgotten. Indeed, most of the London buildings he designed had been pulled down by the 1920s. Just one book has been published about him since his death in 1874: Owen Jones: Ornament, Architecture, and Theory in an Age in Transition, by Carol Flores, an American architecture professor, in 2006. This amply illustrated volume does him full justice, however, in its chronicling of what was a meteoric career. The paucity of reference to Jones is offset by the architect’s own magnum opus, The Grammar of Ornament, which is still in print and remains a classic resource for designers and art-lovers. The overall neglect of Owen Jones is a great pity, since his thought cut to the heart of vital Victorian social issues, and the quest he undertook can still resonate with us today.
The son of a distinguished Welsh antiquarian father after whom he was named, Owen Jones was born in 1809, in London. He attended Charterhouse school and, by the age of sixteen, was apprenticed to the renowned architect, Louis Vulliamy. He spent six years in Vulliamy’s service, and was able to study at the Royal Academy concurrently. In the early 1830s he made the Grand Tour of the continent, visiting France and Italy. He followed this with travels in Egypt, Turkey, Spain and Greece. These experiences did much to lay the foundations of his aesthetics, thefirst formal expression of which is found in a lecture delivered to the Architectural Society in 1835, entitled ‘On the Influence of Religion upon Art’. The address, delivered at the age of just twenty-six, helped to initiate some major debates of the Victorian age.
Jones spoke about his twin preoccupations: the necessity of religious faith to architectural style and the means of applying this in the modern era. He explained it as an ‘endeavour to trace the close connection which has always existed between [styles of architecture] and the religious institutions of the countries which have given them birth, and to deduce from this some of the causes of the actual state of the science [of architecture] in the age in which we live’. He noted that religious institutions were, ‘coeval with [the] formation’ of all civilised nations, and that those nations and their architecture declined with their religious faiths. He then surveyed the architecture of Egypt, for which he had great admiration, calling it the ‘great parent’ of other styles. He emphasised the role of religion on its monuments, and went on to state that Islam had one of the most original architectural styles of all time.
By contrast, Jones said he considered the religious source of British architecture to have been ruined by the Reformation, which, ‘by separating the tie which had ever existed between religion and art, was a deathblow to religious architecture’. Modern Protestant architecture, Jones maintained risking offence, was a violation ‘of good taste, feeling, and religion’. He concluded that, although God would not require human artifice for His worship, perhaps He still cared how man expressed Him; after all, God gave Solomon very specific instructions regarding His temple.
Lamenting the present condition of architecture, Jones announced that, in the wake of the Reformation, ‘there has arisen a religion more powerful, whose works equal, nay, surpass all that the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans have ever conceived. Mammon is the god; Industry and Commerce are the high-priests. Void of poesy, of feeling, or of faith, they have abandoned Art for her bolder sister Science’. There was no longer any point, he maintained, in trying to create a Protestant church style. Since the great works of the time came from science, it should be used to create a new art. Jones’s central concept was that, ‘The use of cast-iron in buildings is constantly applied to science, but never to art. We seem ashamed of the material employed; it must be cased, made to represent what it is not’. This was wrong, Jones argued, since past styles of architecture ‘always endeavoured to be most scrupulously true’. The availability of materials influenced them as much as religion. If the ancients had known about cast iron beams they would have used them, and therefore so should we.
The implication of Jones’s lecture seems to be that a new, contemporary architecture employing modern materials should supplant the old, and that this architecture should be founded on faith in science; Jones can hardly have meant that it should have been based on the worship of Mammon and Industry. Nevertheless, there is some uncertainty concerning faith. Jones emphasised that it is essential for a real architectural style, but seems to have considered contemporary Britain devoid of it. The implications of his ideas are demonstrated by Jones’s subsequent architectural career. ‘On the Influence of Religion upon Art’ was one of the first salvos fired in the great Victorian debate on that topic, one in which Jones was to become deeply involved, chiefly contra Ruskin.
Jones’s first major publication was Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra, which appeared between 1836 and 1845, and, according to Flores, ‘revolutionised the reporting of architecture in Britain’. The volumes were an exhaustive study of one of the greatest works of Moorish architecture. Most of their colour illustrations were based on Jones’s own drawings, using the new chromolithography, which Jones did much to pioneer. The work was deeply imbued with Jones’s convictions about the role of religion in architecture, and reveals his fascination with the Islamic style.
The Alhambra study was a triumph. It helped launch Jones on a career that included designing everything from gift book covers to biscuit tins and playing cards. The success of Alhambra also led Jones into higher social circles, including the coterie of Sir Henry Cole, an influential personage close to Prince Albert. As a consequence, Jones was appointed joint architect – with Joseph Paxton – of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. In keeping with his earlier proposals, the Crystal Palace was a mammoth cast iron and glass structure which, as Jones’s admirer, C. R. Cockerell, opined, ‘would have been but an overgrown greenhouse’ without Jones’s influence. Jones was also responsible for the interior décor. This gave him the chance to employ theories about colour schemes developed during his travels, and his study of ancient polychromy. He chose the primary colours of red, yellow and blue for the interior ironwork, which proved controversial but were eventually accepted.
The resounding success of the Crystal Palace as the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition made Jones an admired public figure. He vowed to use his fame to promote architectural reform and improve public taste – noble Victorian aims. These objectives, combined with Jones’s expertise in the colour schemes and ornamental styles of many nations, were crystallised in his masterpiece, The Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856. With analyses of styles ranging from Maori to Rococo, and his own definitions of beauty, Jones’s Grammar extended and consolidated the convictions he had first suggested in his ‘Religion’ lecture twenty years earlier. He considers devices such as line (that should ‘flow out of a parent stem’) and colour (reserving primary colours for small surfaces, secondary and tertiary colours for larger areas).
Jones states that, ‘The principles discoverable in the works of the past belong to us; not so the results. It is taking the end for the means’. In line with the religion and art lecture, Jones counsels learning from past styles rather than copying them, for that would involve reviving the faiths that created them when they are no longer alive. It is a theme the runs the length of Grammar – indeed the length of Jones’s life.
Through twenty chapters of Grammar, Jones guides the reader from ‘Ornament of Savage Tribes’ through ancient, Byzantine, Renaissance, Celtic, Early English and Elizabethan, French and Italian, up to the mid-eighteenth century. It is written with remarkable consistency of observation. Of Egypt, for example, he notes that all styles ‘approach perfection only so far as they followed, in common with the Egyptians, the true principles to be observed in every flower that grows’. Rather than merely imitating natural forms, he saw true art as the idealisation of natural principles of proportion. While writing on the Moresque style he states that, ‘in every period of faith in art, all ornamentation was ennobled by the ideal; never was the sense of propriety violated by a too faithful representation of nature’. Curiously, this leads him to find the Chinese ‘totally unimaginative’; their ornament copies nature and fails to embellish it with a higher ideal. Jones’s belief in overarching principles led him to observe that,
‘The mosques of Cairo, the Alhambra, Salisbury, Lincoln, Westminster, all possess the same secret of producing the broadest general effects combined with the most elaborate decoration. In all these buildings there is a family likeness…’
Jones expresses the belief that out of ‘the present chaos’ there will arise a new architecture ‘worthy of the high advance which man has made in every other direction’ in the pursuit of knowledge. He sought a new architecture for the scientific age. The Grammar concludes with a fine Victorian evangelical spirit: ‘No improvement can take place in the Art of the present generation until all classes, Artists, Manufacturers, and the Public, are better educated in Art, and the existence of general principles is more fully recognised.’
This provided the basis for his subsequent works. Jones continued his public career with the design of St. James’s Hall, which became London’s premier concert venue for nearly fifty years. His decision to use Desachy’s plaster for the interior, including the beams, popularised the material. Jones’s next public commission was even more modern, and an obvious echo of the Crystal Palace: the Palace of the People in north London. It was yet another Victorian attempt to rejuvenate the spiritual resources of the urban populace with a special recreation space. This and other immense iron and glass pleasure domes were proto-shopping malls, and call to mind Jones’s remark about Mammon as the new god.
During the remainder of the 1850s, and through the 1860s, Jones redesigned the exteriors and interiors of many homes and hotels, as well as contributing to the design of St. Pancras Station and redecorating Fishmonger’s Hall. He accomplished many innovations in interior design during this period, outlining his decorative doctrines in public lectures. Machine printing and washable wallpaper were coming into use, and Jones’s oriental flair is apparent in his creations of the latter. He led the way in changing public taste at this time, and it was mainly English firms using his designs that won interior décor prizes at the 1862 London Exhibition. Spin-offs of Jones’s patterns were widespread in the 1870s, the decade in which the Furniture Gazette lauded him for his ‘pure and good taste’ in wallpaper. Even more, Jones’s successes with wallpaper spilled over into new success with textiles, carpets and other furnishings.
Jones’s genius for harmonious ambiences through corresponding materials, design and colour made him much in demand as an interior decorator for a select clientele. This included the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who paid Jones handsomely to decorate his Arlington Street residence. Meanwhile, London’s nouveau riche hired him to redesign formerly aristocratic residential areas for them, most famously Kensington Palace Gardens. Jones also befriended George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, who entrusted him with the décor for their Regent’s Park digs; Jones even advised Eliot on the cover for the first edition of Middlemarch.
His pièce de résistance, however, was Eynsham Hall in Sussex. Flores describes it as the consummation of the principles in ‘On the True and False in the Decorative Arts’, one of his last public lectures. Now at the apex of his career, Jones advocated assigning a special government minister with coordinating a synthesis of art, science and industry that would make Britain a model for the world.
Owen Jones died at home in London on 19 April 1874. He lived on through his influence on figures such as Christopher Dresser, Viollet le Duc, William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. (John Ruskin, however, made many attacks on him throughout his life.) After his death, and despite these disciples, Jones was quickly forgotten. Little of his work remains apart from the quantity of material archived at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which he helped found. Whether his own work reflected his firm principles is questionable. From Carol Flores’s study it seems he adhered closely to styles from the past, especially Moorish, despite his call for something new. At the same time, his iron and glass constructions were distinctly Victorian, and arguably anticipated the twentieth-century skyscraper. Most importantly, Jones saw spiritual faith as essential to a new architectural style, but could only find science in his time.
Perhaps the rigidity of faith in his era, and the inability of science to provide spiritual sustenance, were his undoing. Nevertheless, Jones made strong and abiding points and, however much he may seem a period piece, his books and materials can continue to inspire.