ABSTRACT
Owen Jones wrote his bestseller The Grammar of Ornament in 1856, on the heels of the Great Exhibition, a turning point in the history of design, architecture, and art theory. At the same time, such well-known writers and architects as W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, Owen Jones, and Gottfried Semper were worried by the aesthetic degradation of ornament industrially produced by machines in a variety of historical styles and materials. Jones wrote his Grammar of Ornament for a public well aware of the flaws in British decorative arts, design, and production. Jones's solution was to put forth, for future practitioners, simple principles of design drawn from nature and past styles with colored illustrative examples, hoping thereby to instigate the creation of a new style of ornament. For readers, Jones's principles and commentaries seem to evoke a 'pure' ornament, as if decoration could exist outside of a specific medium, detached from an actual ornament-carrier.
