‘I have no doubt that discovering Barbara Jones was one of the more important things that happened to me’ – Peter Blake, introduction to The Unsophisticated Arts.

Barbara Jones was one of the most unique voices of twentieth-century British Modernism. Eclectic and indefatigable, she made significant contributions to the fields of Fine Art, mural decoration, illustration, literature, collecting and curatorship.

There is no record of how Jones, still in her twenties, became involved in the Recording Britain Scheme but she was one of the first artist’s to be commissioned and its most prolific contributor. Recording Britain was the brainchild of Sir Kenneth Clark, who saw it as an extension of the Official War Artist scheme. By choosing watercolour painting as the medium of record, Clark hoped that the scheme would also help to preserve this characteristic English art form.

Recording Britain was intended to boost national morale by celebrating the country’s natural beauty and architectural heritage, but it was also a memorial to the war effort itself. The earliest pictures show the landscapes of southern England which were under immediate threat from bomb damage and invasion; in due course the remit was expanded to include those landscapes, buildings and ways of life that were vulnerable to the destructive forces of ‘progress’ – urban expansion, housing developments, road-building and so on.

The scheme employed several women, notably Barbara Jones and Enid Marx. Both were fascinated by English popular art – everything from fairgrounds and follies to topiary and inn signs – and both continued to record these ‘unsophisticated arts’ after the war.