Allen Jones RA

Commissioned from the artist by the present owner in 2007

Allen Jones RA (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014, illustrated in colour fig. 12 

Allen Jones’ witty reinvention of Edouard Manet’s seminal painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire after being shown a small-scale model of the work by the artist. It took nearly 20 months to complete the commission, but the sculpture has now comfortably inhabited Lancelot Brown’s parkland for nearly ten years.

Jones, born in 1937, has for decades led a uniquely distinguished path through 20th Century art. As a pioneer of Pop art during the 1960s and 70s, Jones presented a rich stream of sexualised imagery that appropriated fetishistic magazine imagery alongside the bold tonal values which characterised the Fauves. The tactile qualities of his painted work naturally created an inroad to three-dimensional works, and since the 1980s Jones has been creating monumental figurative sculptures which, like Déjeuner sur l’herbe, are refreshingly irreverent and dynamic. The figures initially emerged from paper cut-out maquettes which when realised in steel become powerful expressions of physical movement. Andrew Lambirth, writing about Jones’ sculptural practice, quotes the artist and describes his singular grasp of material and form: ‘“In painting, the contour describes the volume whereas in the sculpture the volume, in a way, describes the contour”. The challenge of working in sheet metal is “how to unwind an image, so that bits of it come and go as you move around it’. Jones is a master of this delicate ambiguity. Follow the line moving around the edge of a sculpture, then through into a plane, which in turn will box in a form with suggested volume, before moving out into a line again’ (A. Lambirth, Allen Jones:  Works, London, 2005, p. 125).