Owen Jones and the V&A

Olivia Horsfall Turner is Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she looks after the collection of design drawings which document the creative process in art, architecture and design from the fourteenth century to the present day. She also writes, lectures and broadcasts about architecture, history and ideas.

• Director’s Foreword; Series Editor’s Foreword; Introduction: From the Great Exhibition to the South Kensington Museum; Chapter 1 - ‘An ever-gushing fountain’: The Grammar of Ornament; Chapter 2 - Applied Principles: The ‘Oriental Court’; Chapter 3 - ‘Suggestive Character’: Examples of Chinese Ornament; Conclusion - ‘The Lawgiver of Ornamental Art’; Notes; Further Reading; Acknowledgements; Index.

‘In Owen Jones and the V&A: Ornament for a modern age (Lund Humphries), Olivia Horsfall Turner deftly places Jones in the vanguard of the design revolution, charting his key role in the decoration of the Great Exhibition and the V&A’s “Oriental Court”, and highlighting his equally innovative Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867). Horsfall Turner is level-headed about Jones’s “Orientalism”, but concludes that he decisively put non-western design sources centre stage.’ – James Hall, *TLS Books of the Year *