Charles Jones (photographer)

1902 image of carrots

Charles Harry Jones (1866 – 15 November 1959) was an English gardener and photographer, noted for his still lifes of fruit and vegetables.

Biography

Born in Wolverhampton in 1866, Charles Harry Jones became a gardener, working on a number of private estates in England from the 1890s, including Great Ote Hall, near Burgess Hill, Sussex. His gardening was noted for the quality of his flowerbeds and cultivation of fruits and vegetables. As a photographer, Jones was noted for his documentation of the fruits of his gardening labours. Jones also offered his services as a photographer to other gardeners.

He died in Lincolnshire on 15 November 1959, aged ninety-two.

Photographic work

Jones's work was never exhibited in his lifetime, and was largely unknown, even to his family, until it was discovered by accident in a suitcase, along with hundreds of other images of vegetables, fruits and flowers, in 1981 at Bermondsey antiques market by Sean Sexton. Since Sexton's discovery the collection has slowly been dispersed by him through auction and by other means. It has been collected by institutions and private collectors and exhibited at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Musée de Elysée, Lausanne and at other venues. A monograph, The Plant Kingdoms Of Charles Jones, was published in 1998.

Sources

• Article in The Gardener's Chronicle, 20 September 1905.
• The Plant Kingdoms Of Charles Jones, by Sean Sexton and Robert Flynn Johnson. London: Thames And Hudson, 1998. ISBN 0-500-54222-8. Preface by Alice Waters.