The Unsophisticated Genius of Barbara Jones

Bateman the Opticians, Croydon, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

Since I first came across Barbara Jones' extraordinary book 'The Unsophisticated Arts' a few years ago I've been wondering when somebody would reissue it, and now independent publisher Little Toller Books has gone a step further. I asked Gracie Burnett, who co-owns and runs Little Toller with Adrian Cooper, how they came to publish this new edition, which is rather different from their previous nature classics...

We decided to re-issue because we love Barbara Jones and have always done so. It seemed we were talking more and more with friends about her and I guess we were prompted by these conversations to go for it and republish the book. Simon Costin who curated the show at the Whitechapel was key and whilst drinking tea with him at a cafe in Dalston we got to talking about the exhibition and the book. We felt confident and so the journey begun. 

It is a departure for us. But we have always said to ourselves that we should publish what we like and to take the odd detour away from the Classics.

Barbara Jones enjoying her work - what is that peculiar ornament on the bookshelf?

As with their previous titles Little Toller haven't simply reprinted the original edition but have substantially redesigned it, decluttering a spread here and updating an illustration there. Gracie again:

The design is very different. Adrian spent hours trawling through Barbara Jones’s  studio in Hampstead and discovered so much that we wanted to include in the new edition, especially as we wanted to bring more colour to the book - the original is mostly black and white. We also wanted to show her working process, hence the inclusion of sketches and early paintings. 

Her studio has remained largely untouched since her death; most of the artwork has gone, but her sketchbooks and ephemera remain.  We spent hundreds of hours cleaning up the images and making them good for publication. it was a joy to work on because you look so closely at every single image and you see each page in a new way.

The new edition is lighter, brighter and more colourful than the original, which was printed on paper made out of recycled porridge (it was 1951, after all). A little of the chiaroscuro of Jones's vision is lost - the photos of roundabout horses are not quite as black and sinister as they were previously - but all in all this is a fantastic book. Buy it now!

No detail too small... Interior of a canal boat, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

I meant to write a post on Joan Eardley last week, after reading Christopher Andreae's wonderful new book, but time got away from me. Neither Eardley nor Jones lived as long as they should have, and both had a fascination for the local and particular that went down badly with critics of the time but which now makes them - to my mind - seem doubly valuable as fine artists and chroniclers of everyday life. While Eardley became well-known for her paintings of children from now-vanished Glasgow slums, Jones is now recognised as one of the most significant arbiters of modern taste.

In a Foreword to the new edition, Peter Blake notes that 'I have no doubt that discovering Barbara Jones was one of the more important things that happened to me, and helped form the way I work.' In her books and in her almost unclassifiable 1951 exhibition 'Black Eyes and Lemonade', Jones introduced what she called 'the vernaculars' to a culture desperate for some alternative to pretentious, soulless modernism. She wasn't worried about distinctions between folk and machine-made art but stuck them altogether, choosing work that was, as she put it 'bold and fizzy.'

Never judge a book by its cover? Maybe in this case...

Her books show a similarly eclectic spirit. 'The Unsophisticated Arts' combines chapters on tattooing and the seaside, amusement arcades and taxidermy, each illustrated with a mixture of photographs, line drawings and paintings. It is disorderly, intensely personal and obsessive, but at the same time the book  hangs together perfectly.

Ravilious would have loved this, from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

It helps that Jones was also an excellent writer, the kind who (I imagine) wrote down words as she would have spoken them. Like her contemporary Olive Cook she writes seriously about her subject in a way that an intelligent child could understand perfectly - and enjoy too. I love this introduction to the chapter on Roundabouts:

When the Romans left England there were a thousand dull years filled only with ballads, pipe and tabor, folk dancing and maypoles. Gradually, however, the fairs emerge from the manuscripts, the tumblers and dancing bears begin to perform, and at last there is something to look at.

from 'Recording Britain', early 1940s (V&A)

Here and there you hear echoes of earlier books like 'High Street', as in the chapter on shopkeeping, where we visit a butcher's that Ravilious would have recognised, complete with 'butcher's cat, noticeably sleek, and apparently unmoved even by the sale of liver'. It would have been fun if Jones had written the text of 'High Street', given her eye for the aesthetics of shops:

He makes beautiful patterns with carcasses and joints and festoons of sausages or, when meat is scarce, he hangs up sheets of paper by their corners, cut into patterns if he has time, and heightened with loops of black pudding.

Interior of saddler's shop, Croydon, from 'Recording Britain' (V&A)
I wonder if this was her Dad's place, as he was a successful Croydon saddler.

Born in 1912 a decade later than Ravilious, Bawden, Peggy Angus and Enid Marx, Barbara Jones trained at the RCA in the 1930s and cut her teeth on the 'Recording Britain' project during the early part of World War Two. Among the myriad pictures of old houses, pubs and quintessentially English scenes, Jones's work stands out. She was clearly much more than a topographical painter, imbuing her subjects with personality. A light touch and a sure eye were hers from the start.

St Mary's Homes and Chapel, Godstone, 'Recording Britain' (V&A)

Fairground litho, 1946 (V&A) - there's a detailed chapter on this subject in 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

I suspect that many artists besides Peter Blake owe a debt to Barbara Jones; she looked about her with keen eyes, found subjects no-one had bothered with before and took her discoveries seriously - but never too seriously. One of her more extraordinary achievements was the book 'Design for Death', in which she expanded on the final chapter of 'The Unsophisticated Arts', exploring all the 'beautiful, vulgar, frightening and propitiatory things that people make when confronted by that shocking and unwelcome reminder, the death of another'. The cover alone is remarkable, both beautiful and grotesque; I hope that her own death in 1978 was commemorated in suitable style.

An extraordinary cover for an extraordinary book...

On a lighter note... an illustration from 'The Unsophisticated Arts'

Recently, Barbara Jones has become known to a wider public, thanks in part to the tireless Ruth Artmonsky and her 2008 tribute 'A Snapper Up of Unconsidered Trifles'. Gracie adds:

She's become popular I think because of a new audience today, and because of the revival in artists of that time and the influence they have today. There's a new breed of artist who are deeply inspired by people like her, Bawden and Ravilious. etc etc.

At the moment The Whitechapel Gallery are hosting an exhibition about 'Black Eyes and Lemonade', and in June there's going to be a selling show of work from Jones's own collection at Burgh House in Hampstead. The pieces below will be featured. Meanwhile, if you want to know a bit more about her books, there's a nice page at Ash Rare Books.

Original artwork for 'Gift Book', on display at Burgh House, Hampstead, June 2013 

Original artwork from 'The Unsophisticated Arts' - also at Burgh House

Stook Duck Houses, Calbourne Water Mill, Isle of Wight

She was the author of three important books that significantly affected the taste and perception of her contemporaries in ways that more famous artists have never succeeded in doing. The first, The Unsophisticated Arts (1951), opened people’s eyes to the art in everyday life … and that the enjoyment of art was not restricted to an educated few, but was available for the enjoyment of all. It is difficult to over-emphasise her work in this area, but one can see the effects in the displays in almost every museum and gallery throughout the country today. The second, Follies and Grottoes, developed an entirely new field for architectural and building historians, and led to the founding of an international society … The third, Design for Death (1967), sparked a similar fashion for the study of funeral customs, cemeteries, and artifacts associated with death … How many other artists and writers can boast of having achieved so much in changing the perception and temper of succeeding generations? … The roll-call of English artists in the twentieth century is not so lengthy that we can afford to overlook such a distinctive figure.  (BC Bloomfield – The Life and Work of Barbara Jones [1912-1978] via Ash Rare Books)

All work shown is the copyright of Barbara Jones's estate.

Three New Titles from Little Toller Books

Illustration by Stephen Bone from 'The Military Orchid'

I love old books, and always have - there's nothing I can do about it now. As a writer I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's rather sobering to scan the spines of hundreds of books, all once deemed worthy of publication and now entirely forgotten. An author may have written twenty, fifty or a hundred titles only a few decades ago and now be unknown to all but the lover of old books; we are like the people who explore graveyards, spinning stories from the inscriptions on the stones (OK, we're the same people). The graveyard reminds us of our mortality and the shelf of old books tells us that our success - whatever it may be - is fleeting.

On the other hand you never know when you might find a kindred spirit among a shelf of old books. I have more in common with Edward Thomas than with 90% of my contemporaries . I love his poetry but have a greater affection for some of his prose. 'In Pursuit of Spring' is a wonderful book, as is 'The South Country' - the story of the clerk who spends every summer working on the land expresses perfectly the rootlessness of modern (sub)urban life. Thomas befriended, championed and looked after the poet WH Davies, whose 'Autobiography of a Super-Tramp' I picked up the other day and read mostly in one sitting. Published in 1908 and written in simple, unsentimental prose, it is a frank account of a youth most people would consider misspent. The particular edition I found was from Jonathan Cape's Traveller's Library of the 1930s, and it looks, feels and smells as if a tramp had been carrying it around for a while.

The Saxon font at Little Toller

Not so my copy of 'The South Country', which is a new, sweet-smelling paperback published by Little Toller Books. Yes, there is a publisher that loves old books enough to rescue them from the charity shop and reissue them, and does so with style and economy. Inspired in part by Common Ground and their wonderful 'England in Particular', Little Toller has gone deep into the back catalogue, like Edward Thomas exploring the hidden lanes of Sussex and Hampshire, and pulled out a series of wonders. It is fitting that the press has as its emblem a figure from the Saxon font in the church at Little Toller in Dorset, one of artist and antiquarian John Piper's favourite objects.

Until this month there were twelve titles in Little Toller's Nature Classics Library. Alongside 'The South Country' there's Adrian Bell's 'Men and the Fields', which offers a fascinating picture of rural England shortly before World War Two, and books by Richard Jefferies and WH Hudson. Oh, and Richard Mabey's 'Unofficial Countryside' is in there too, which, since Mabey is still very much with us, rather brilliantly connects past and present. The books are nicely-weighted, reasonably-priced paperbacks with beautiful covers and illustrations by artists who are also in some cases long-forgotten.

Page from 'Sweet Thames Run Softly'

Recently three more titles have appeared, with the same distinctive covers, each colour-coded and bearing on the front a beautifully-reproduced painting. The most obvious choice, perhaps, is 'In the Country', Kenneth Allsop's account of life in Dorset which was first published in 1972. A famous TV presenter of the day (a kind of celebrity that fades even faster than literary renown), Allsop was also an energetic conservationist; this book charts a year at the old mill he and his family moved to from London, combining history, environmental debate and witty observations of nature:

Outside my window a dove is working itself up into a lather. Nervous collapse is imminent. It struts like a Grenadier drill sergeant. Its neck is curved as a drawn bow. Its chest bulges with simmering aggressiveness. It pounds the balcony tiles with pink feet. From its throat comes a furious rumbling. It is spluttering with foiled rage... How, I wonder once more, did the dove become the emblem of peace?

The name Robert Gibbings seemed familiar when I saw the second book, 'Sweet Thames Run Softly', but it took a moment to remember that he ran the Golden Cockerel Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s, commissioning Eric Ravilious and other wood engravers to illustrate his books. Gibbings was himself a talented wood engraver and in this book combined the roles of writer and illustrator to beautiful effect. Like 'Men and the Fields', this book takes us on a tour of England just before the war, only in this case the journey was down the Thames in a home-made glass-bottomed punt.

Cover image: David Inshaw, 'Oak Tree, Bonfire and Fireworks', 2004

This kind of particularity defines the Little Toller list as much as the interest in natural history. Each of the authors plucked from the past has an individual vision and an unusual way of going about things, although few are as odd as Jocelyn Brooke. I had no idea who this was, although I did recognise the painting on the cover of 'The Military Orchid' as the work of David Inshaw, and not being particularly interested in orchids I dipped into the book only to find that the flowers are only part of the story. Brooke was by all accounts an odd chap, an observer of flora and people who tried his hand at various aspects of 'real life' and in the end preferred to live in the country with his childhood nanny and write a stream of books.

From an Edwardian childhood to service in a mobile VD clinic during World War Two his memoir is funny, acerbic and full of life, surely one of the most interesting books to be published this autumn. I particularly enjoyed his frankness as a botanist, his admission that he preferred the experts who supported his identification of a particular plant and confession that many plants bored him silly. Here's the opening:

Mr Bundock's function, so far as my family was concerned, was to empty the earth-closet twice a week at the cottage where we used to spend the summer. This duty he performed unobtrusively and usually late at night: looming up suddenly in the summer dusk, earth-smelling and hairy like some menial satyr... He became of sudden interest to me one June evening by asserting, quite calmly, that he had found the lizard orchid. 

I wonder what they'll dig up next...