Harold Jones (artist)

Harold Jones (22 February 1904 – 1992)[1] was a British artist, illustrator and writer of children's books. Critic Brian Alderson (children's book critic) called him "perhaps the most original children's book illustrator of the period". He established his reputation with lithographs illustrating This Year: Next Year (1937), a collection of verses by Walter de la Mare.[2]

Jones was born in London and studied illustration there from 1920 at Goldsmiths College, under Edmund Sullivan, a former teacher of Arthur Rackham; at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1922–1923; and then on scholarship at the Royal College of Art.[1]

Jones's most acclaimed work was Lavender's Blue: A book of nursery rhymes (1954), a collection of nursery rhymes named for one of them, "Lavender's Blue". The British Library Association awarded Jones "Special Commendation" for the 1954 Carnegie Medal, which recognised the year's outstanding children's book written by a British subject; it provided a "major reason" for the organisation to establish its companion Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration that year (1955).[3] Lavender's Blue, published in the U.S. by Franklin Watts in 1956,[4] was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1960.[1]

The largest public archive of Harold Jones's papers and illustrations is at Seven Stories, National Centre for Children's Books (deposited by the Harold Jones estate in 2005).[5] Other of Harold Jones's papers, deposited from 1966 to 1980, are in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi.[1]