Inspiration  /  Geometric Patterns in The Grammar of Ornament

Geometric Patterns in The Grammar of Ornament

Owen Jones (1809 - 1874) was an influential English designer, theorist, and architect. In The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Jones attempts to "set out to reacquaint his colleagues with the underlying principles that made art beautiful," according to Femke Speelberg and Robyn Fleming. In other words, he wanted to explore the universal laws that made something beautiful, no matter the culture of the artists. Some of his studies were drawn from his travels, but many were taken after items in British museums and collections.

The book, still in print today, includes more than one hundred multi-color plates of designs from different cultures. At the time, images were reproduced using a technique called chromolithography. Every color in a reproduced image would've been made with a separate plate, lined up and pressed onto the paper, and Jones was remarkable for pushing the technique and his printmaking team to use as many as twenty lithographic plates per image. (For the book nerds, these plates begin to degrade with multiple printings. This is why first editions were so valuable -- their images were sharpest.)

The Grammar of Ornament was also notable for Jones' assertion that beauty from all cultures has its basis in the forms of nature. He asserts that progress in ornamental art adn design comes not from rejecting the past nor following it blindly, but from returning to nature for "fresh inspiration" and applying those teachings to our knowledge of the past. Because of this emphasis on the importance of nature, he includes several plates of designs taken directly from botanical forms.