Featured on PDR in the collection Owen Jones’ Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867)

In The Grammar of Ornament (1856), his highly influential sourcebook that defined decoration as a universal human impulse, the architect Owen Jones had nothing kind to say about Chinese art and ornament. This diatribe catches the present-day reader slightly off-guard, coming as it does after a series of surprisingly cosmopolitan claims: claims that Moorish ornamentation achieved a level of perfection that Christian artisans would only begin to approximate centuries later; that Mexican decoration leaves a viewer “astonished” by its “high state” of execution; that in all of Indian art, “we find nothing that has been added without purpose, nor that could be removed without disadvantage.” When Jones reaches China, however, he immediately lapses into a cultural chauvinism born from ignorance, making claims that the millennia…