5pm

The architect, designer and educator Owen Jones (1809-1874) was a hugely influential figure in Victorian design. Before his book The Grammar of Ornament (1856) became a bestseller, he published Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of The Alhambra: From Drawings Taken on the Spot in 1834 and 1837 (1842-5). This beautifully illustrated book popularised Islamic architecture and design throughout Victorian Britain, a style used for smoking rooms, billiard rooms, swimming pools and Turkish baths.

In this talk Dr Ailsa Boyd will look at the Arlington Baths Club, in particular the Turkish room (added 1875), in the wider context of the Victorian’s love for the exotic, and Jones’s belief that good design was necessary for a healthy society.

Tickets are free but limited, book here at Eventbrite.

Dr Ailsa Boyd is an independent writer, lecturer and curator, of 19th century art, design and literature. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Identity and Domestic Space in Victorian Literature: Houses and Fictions in George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton. This explores the intersection of the real homes of the authors with those they created in their fictions, against the vibrant background of the design reform movement in the late nineteenth century. Her academic publications include Beatrix Whistler, manuals of household taste, Henry James and art, and Edith Wharton’s approach to interior design. The most recent is ‘”A conscious memento”: The literary afterlives of Henry James’s Lamb House’ in Interiors (2019).