Rather than go on, I will just recommend the Whitechapel Art Gallery to you, where in a single room and a very small way the exhibition Black Eyes and Lemonade pays tribute to Barbara Jones until September 1. Poster designs for Black Eyes and Lemonade, Jones’s 1951 exhibition of popular art and design at the Whitechapel Gallery. Her contemporaries and her peers on the Recording Britain project in wartime included Kenneth Rowntree, Eric Ravilious, John Piper and Edward Bawden but she remains far less well known. Jones made Pop Art before the term had been invented. All three were hobbled by living in a pre-feminist world and wary of making too many compromises with it. Jones’s little sketches and cartoons were very like those of the poet Stevie Smith, whom I feel sure that she must also have met. She could have read English at Oxford instead of going to art school and her friendships were often with those who had – Rose Macaulay, author of The Towers of Trebizond, whose London novel The World my Wilderness has an evocative book jacket by Barbara Jones. When I met Alice a few weeks later I asked if her sailorman was a kind of homage to Barbara Jones’s tattoed book-cover man, and she said,’ Oh, Barbara Jones! I think my life is a homage to her!’ and I was smitten.īarbara Jones was interested in almost everything, taxidermy, tattoeing, shop signs, toys, advertising, labels and packets, shellwork, folk art, buildings and landscapes, but perhaps not so much in people. The print was for sale for about £30 and I bought one. There is a chapter on roundabouts – ‘Demountable Baroque’ – and the first of its plates is of taxidermists preparing a record-breaking Tunny fish for preservation. This became my favourite of all her books. Unknown to us the gallery had been selling over the telephone and everything that we wanted had a red dot, but £50 bought me ‘Photographer’s background,’ her little sketch from The Unsophisticated Arts. When the Katherine House Gallery held a sale of her studio contents in 1999 we got up at dawn to be first when the doors opened. She had painted a mysterious landscape dotted with temples and follies enshrining birds, including a penguin, but I took no photographs and that is all I remember about it. I found the damp gothic gazebo at Marston Hall in Lincolnshire with her mural inside, invented for the antiquarian Squarson the Rev.

I hung about in Crickhowell (the little town in the Usk valley where she owned a cottage with Clifford Barry whom she married and lived with intermittently), noticing what she must have seen and liked there. I wonder whether she drew this very beautiful SHUT sign for the pottery on the opposite corner of the street, where the shop door makes a mirror for the house where she lived? Barbara Jones’s house at 2 Well Walk in Hampstead, a solid five storeys in red brick.

The Isle of Wight by Barbara Jones