Window in the Alcove. Hall of the Two Sisters

Window in the Alcove. Hall of the Two Sisters  

Owen Jones, 1842 

Chromolithograph 

The architects Owen Jones and Jules Goury arrived in Granada in 1834 after a tour in Greece and Turkey. Goury died that year, but Jones returned in 1837 and produced numerous drawings of plans and elevations, and paper tracings and plaster casts of ornament. He was the first to take scrapings of residual colour pigments on the walls of the palace, which led him to suggest that the interior spaces had been intensely coloured, with the primary colours (red, blue, yellow) dominating the upper parts of the interiors and the secondary colours (purple, green, orange) found in the lower parts. He also suggested (without evidence) that the columns had been originally gilded. His ideas about the use of colour in the Alhambra are exemplified in this plate depicting a restored view of the ‘Hall of the Two Sisters’ in the palace. It is one of the 68 chromolithographs that Jones self-published at his own expense in his two-volume Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra between 1842 and 1845.  

By comparison with the romanticised images by Roberts and Lewis, Jones’s publication provided more accurate knowledge of the building, its materials and the function of the different spaces. The scholarly intent of Jones’s project is underpinned by the textual contributions to his volumes by the Spanish Arabist scholar Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897), who lived in London at the time of Jones’s undertaking. Gayangos not only wrote an essay on the history of Nasrid Granada, but also provided translations of the inscriptions that Jones had copied from the walls on the Alhambra.  

Jones’s publication stimulated debates about the use of colour and ornament in modern design and architecture in Britain. Jones encouraged practitioners to learn from the underlying principles of Nasrid ornament for use in modern projects. In 1854 Jones made the Alhambra tangible for mass audiences in Britain by creating an ‘Alhambra court’ at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. 

Title: Window in the Alcove. Hall of the Two Sisters.  

Author/Artist: Owen Jones (1809-1874). 

Technique and Material: Chromolithograph. 

Size: 450 x 310 mm 

Published: Plate 20 from Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra: from drawings taken on the spot in 1834 by the late M Jules Goury and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones Archt. With a complete translation of the Arabic transcriptions, and an historical notice of the Kings of Granada, from the conquest of that city by the Arabs to the expulsion of the Moors, by Mr Pasqual de Gayangos, London: published by Owen Jones, 1842-1845. Vol I. 

Date: 1842. 

Marks and Inscriptions: in capital letters, beneath the image: ‘La Alhambra’ and above the image: ‘La Ventana Sala de las Dos Hermanas’. 

Institution: Private collection.