English Furniture at a Glance

Artists: Various 
Author: Barbara Jones 
Publisher: The Architectural Press 
Date: 1954 
Condition: A first edition hardback, complete with neatly clipped original dust wrapper over the yellow boards; the wrapper with a few chips and nicks to the edges and a little discoloured along the top edge, but complete apart from a very minor loss to the top of the spine edge. Internally, a little foxing to the flyleaves but otherwise clean and unmarked.

Best known now as the author of The Unsophisticated Arts, a pioneering look at the overlooked folk arts of fairgrounds, circus, shop fronts and canal boats, Barbara Jones deserves to be more widely known than she is.

An RCA graduate, she was taught by both Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious and turned her hand to all kinds of artistic endeavours during the 1940s.

In 1951 she co-curated a groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Black Eyes and Lemonade, a show which juxtaposed folk art alongside mass-produced consumer objects, thus anticipating many of the ideas that would be developed in Pop Art later in the decade.

This small guide to English furniture styles from the medieval to the present day is not only interesting and useful, but is hugely enlivened by over 200 line drawings Jones made to illustrate the volume. These often include some gentle humour - even on the title page, which is set in a very traditional manner, she includes a drawing of Ernest Race's Antelope chair, then an almost brand new design having been produced for the 1951 Festival of Britain!