In 1865, Owen Jones joined Day & Son as a company director. Day & Son, formerly Day & Haghe, were considered leaders in the British colour printing industry. It had been founded by William Day and Louis Haghe, a Belgian lithographer whose most notable project had been 250 chromolithographs for David Roberts’s The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842-9). However, despite their reputation, in 1836, Jones had broken his contract with Haghe to print his treatise on architectural polychromy Plans, Sections, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra (1836-45) complaining that the process had been ‘a most horrid waste of time, paper, and consequently money’. Instead, Jones pioneered his own technique, consulting with Michel Eugene Chevreul, to produce the ‘rainbow colours’ which launched his reputation as ‘the most potent apostle of colour’. His relationship with the firm was rekindled after Haghe’s departure and they subsequently printed Jones’s most famous volume The Grammar of Ornament in 1856.

In the same year Jones joined as a director, he published The History of Joseph and His Brethren which illustrates 3 chapters from the Book of Genesis. For a lover of colour such as Jones, the story of Joseph seems a natural choice. The key moment that sets Joseph’s destiny in motion is when his father presents his favourite son with a ‘coat of many colours’. This gift sends Joseph’s brothers into a jealous rage and they sell him to Egyptian slavers.

Jones worked with father-son team Henry and Arthur Warren to print 52 chromolithographed plates. Each gold page contains a biblical verse, in red and black lettering, and on the verso, a full-page colour illustration using up to 13 different colours.

These sit within colourful decorative borders which draw on Egyptian examples from The Grammar of Ornament.

In contrast to Jones’s previous biblically-themed chromolithographic publications from the 1840s, which adopted the Gothic Revival style of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Joseph and his Brethren embraces the colourful Orientalist motifs he had cultivated by visiting Spain and Egypt and later expressed in the painted interiors for the Alhambra Court at the Crystal Palace Sydenham in 1854. After being taken to Egypt, Joseph enters a world littered with the material culture of ancient Egypt, with objects such as vases, stools, tables and chests which are covered in colourful decoration. Jones sourced these objects from visits to the British Museum or texts such as Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836).

The stylistic choices of Joseph and his Brethren also reflect the wider significance of Britain’s relationship with the Middle East at this moment. A key motivation was to discover empirical evidence, through archaeological digs and pseudo-scientific activities such as biblical geography, to reinforce Victorian Christians’ faith that the stories of the Bible were true. Jones’s colourful interpretation of this Old Testament narrative embraced these practices and their subsequent discoveries.

This book, a highlight of mid-Victorian book illustration, demonstrates Jones’s mastery of chromolithographic printing as well as being one of the many visual tools he used to disseminate his fervent beliefs on the colours of the ancient past.