Ornament and the Other: Owen Jones and the Design of Victorian Modernity
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Barringer, Tim
Abstract
From the Gothic Revival of the 1840s to the Japonisme of the Aesthetic Movement, the appropriation of global, historical ornament was a hallmark of Victorian design. While the ideological and epistemological connections of this practice with British imperialism are well documented, little attention has been paid to the material processes that naturalized ornament from past and distant peoples within the everyday spaces of Victorian life.This dissertation addresses the material workings of ornamental appropriation through a critical re-examination of the career of Owen Jones (1809-1874). A leading voice of British design reform and formative figure in canonical histories of modernism, Jones drew continuously upon the artistic traditions of past and distant peoples. His influential theories of design emerged from his study of sources ranging from Egyptian temples to Indian textiles to medieval French manuscripts; motifs from such sources regularly feature in his commissions for books, wallpapers, textiles, and architectural interiors. As both a practitioner and theorist of design, Jones positioned the appropriation of global, historical ornament as a conduit for an aesthetics of Victorian modernity. My investigation of Jones focuses on three of his most important projects: the architectural album Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra (published between 1836 and 1845); the Fine Art Courts at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (opened in 1854), a series of displays representing periods of art history through plaster facsimiles of monuments and sculptures; and The Grammar of Ornament, an encyclopedic compendium of global, historical patterns that has remained in print since its publication in 1856. Across these chapters, I demonstrate how Jones’s practice of ornamental appropriation developed from his intensive study of the Alhambra, the medieval Islamic palace complex in Granada, Spain, to encompass a potentially limitless array of sources. Meanwhile, each chapter identifies the individual processes of replication, circulation, and display—which I characterize holistically as “intermedial translation”—by which each of these projects transformed global, historical sources into ornamental resources for the design of manufactured goods. Across these chapters, I foreground the material processes of intermedial translation to demonstrate how the specificities of media, formats, and contexts of productions conditioned Jones’s appropriation of ornament. These processes formed a bridge between the disparate material surfaces of Jones’s sources and the industrial surfaces of jacquard-woven textiles, roller-printed wallpaper, or chromolithographed books. My analysis in each chapter illuminates the manifold intersections between the practices of intermedial translation and the influential theories of ornamental history and practice that Jones expounded in his writings. Throughout, I approach ornamental appropriation as an aesthetic expression of the extractive and racializing projects of nineteenth-century imperialism and industrial capitalism. Each chapter therefore highlights instances in which Jones’s approach to intermedial translation intersects with logics of the commodity and racial hierarchy. By attending to these ideological and epistemological structures, this project reveals how they materialized within the practice and theory of Victorian design.
Recommended Citation
Olson, Christine, "Ornament and the Other: Owen Jones and the Design of Victorian Modernity" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1157.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1157
