The Book Art of Alfred Garth Jones

Alfred Garth Jones (1872–1955) was a versatile graphic artist and designer whose work included illustrations for authors as diverse as Milton (1898) and Tennyson (1901); he also furnished covers for The Quartier Latin (1901) and the first edition of Arthur Conan Doyles’ The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), as well as bindings for his own imprints. Jones shifted easily between styles, and his work of the 1890s reflects the impact of the competing styles of Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts. In the Victorian period his output dates from 1894 to 1901, and most of his books were published in the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is instructive to consider Jones as a late Victorian whose art represents one of the many expressions of multiplicity that characterize the final years of the period.

Biography and Career

Jones was born in Hulme, Manchester in 1872 and died in Sidcup, Kent in 1955. His background appears to have been lower middle-class; his father was a technical draughtsman who later became a lecturer in Engineering. The family’s economic status was modest, but Jones made his way, nevertheless, through a vigorous training. His initial studies were at the Manchester School of Art, but he quickly progressed to the National Art Training School in South Kensington, London (which became the Royal College of Art in 1896), and thereafter went on to the Slade School of Art and the Académie Julian in Paris, where he was a contemporary of another accomplished book designer of the 90s, William Brown Macdougall.

Jones returned to England in 1894 and, in addition to marrying and settling in London, worked in a variety of capacities; in time honoured fashion, he became a journeyman artist, taking whatever work he could. For much of his early career he was a teacher: he was an instructor at the Lambeth School of Art (1896–99), and in 1902 he was a tutor at the Carlton Club, which had been set up by the book designer A. A. Turbayne as a training venue for Canadian artists seeking to improve their skills in commercial and graphic art.

In these years, and beyond the turn of the century, Jones practised as a freelance designer whose work embraced several disciplines. He produced stained glass windows for the City Hall in Cardiff (1906), a project that reaffirmed his Welsh ancestry, and he designed an ornamental mosaic for the pediment of the Hull School of Art (1904), which was executed by the Bromsgrove Guild. These commissions ran in parallel with many other activities – painting, designing book covers, teaching (he was again a teacher at the Lambeth School, 1910–12), and creating posters and magazine designs.

His surviving legacy, however, is in the form of the eight or so publications he illustrated between 1894 and 1901, along with a series of bindings.

Jones’s Graphic Styles

As noted earlier, Jones was a versatile practitioner who actively experimented with style and drew eclectically on diverse sources, both contemporary and derived from past masters, sometimes fusing the two in a single work. The Studio published one of his figure drawings, Love, Youth and Death (Studio 24, 113) in which he emulates the manner of Fred Sandys and the severe wood engravings of Dürer. This composition exemplifies Jones’s ‘powerful’ (‘Elia,’Studio 25, 114) draughtsmanship, which R. E. D. Sketchley described as ‘austere, classical, controlled’ (15) and closely reflects his extensive training.

Three examples of Jones’s linear drawing: a) Love, Youth and Death, and b) and c), illustrations for The essays of Elia.

Linear figure design, usually in a classical or medievalist idiom, is a key characteristic of his art as a whole and can be seen, for example, in his illustrations for Milton’s Minor Poems (1898) and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1901). For both of these he creates imposing characters defined in muscular lines, and the same is true of his illustrations in Jérôme Doucet’s De Haute-Lisse (1899), one of the works he published in France and which gained him a considerable reputation on the other side of the Channel; according to one commentator, he was ‘more widely known’ in that country he was in the United Kingdom (‘Studio Talk,’ 131).

More of Jones’s images Left: the frontispiece for Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Right: for Milton’s Minor Poems.

All of these drawings could be described as traditional, but Jones responded, in equal measure, to the aesthetics of Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. Much of his design could be viewed as a version of Morrisonian medievalism, and recalls the austere drawing of Arthur Gaskin, but in some of his designs he deploys sinuous rhythms and flat passages of black and white which reflect the influence of Aubrey Beardsley. As in the art of his contemporary Macdougall, Jones is an artist positioned at a confluence of styles.

Unlike Macdougall, however, Jones does not engage with the more extravagant aspects of Art Nouveau: he does not produce elaborate, convoluted interlaces, nor does he use the more obvious motifs of the new style, such as hearts and vine-leaves. Jones’s approach is far more restrained than Macdougall’s and seems to have been inspired by the geometrical version of Art Nouveau that is evident in the art of Beardsley but is more obviously derived from the elegant, elongated motifs and curvilinearity of the Glasgow style. Jones’s work in this idiom is typified by his borders for Doucet’s Contes de Haute-Lisse (1899), by the simplified trees on the titlepage and frontispiece for Milton’s Minor Poems (1898), and by the figure and floral motifs on the front cover of The Quartier Latin (1898). In each case Jones presents flat, linear abstractions of natural forms which are self-consciously ‘sophisticated’ and elegant.

More of Jones’s images Left: Headpiece for Milton’sMinor Poems, and Right: for Doucet’sTales of Haute-Lisse..

At once an artist of traditional drawings and one engaging with the styles of the 1890s, Jones synthesizes the various elements in his vocabulary to create a sort of hybrid, an approach that characterizes the main part of his work. What all of his illustrations display is a strong sense of design combined with a sensitive understanding of his texts; as one critic observed of his work for Tennyson’s In Memoriam, his images are ‘full of poetic feeling’ (Studio 24, 147) which closely mirrors the poem’s melancholy and doubts.