Background
Robert Edmond was born on December 12, 1887 in Milton, New Hampshire, United States, the son of Fred Jones, a farmer, and Emma Cowell Jones, a piano teacher. At an early age Jones showed skill in drawing.
(The Dramatic Imagination is one of the few enduring works...)
The Dramatic Imagination is one of the few enduring works written about set design. Robert Edmond Jones's innovations in set design and lighting brought new ideas to the stage, but it is greater understanding of design - its role at the heart of theater - that has continued to inspire theater students. The volume includes "A New Kind of Drama," "To a Young Stage Designer" and six other of Jones's "reflections."
https://www.amazon.com/Dramatic-Imagination-Reflections-Speculations-Theatre/dp/0878301844?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0878301844
Robert Edmond was born on December 12, 1887 in Milton, New Hampshire, United States, the son of Fred Jones, a farmer, and Emma Cowell Jones, a piano teacher. At an early age Jones showed skill in drawing.
Jones began violin lessons at the age of nine. He attended public schools in Milton and graduated in 1905 from Nute High School there. In the fall of 1906 Jones entered Harvard University, where he pursued a liberal arts curriculum, enrolled in the drama course given by George Pierce Baker (but was not invited to join the select group of Baker's favored pupils), played violin in the Harvard Pierian Sodality Orchestra and graduated cum laude in 1910. He continued at Harvard for two years, first as a graduate assistant and later as an instructor in the department of fine arts.
After studies Jones went to New York, where he did a series of minor jobs as a costume designer for the firm of Comstock and Gest. In 1913, with the financial help of a few friends (including John Reed and Kenneth MacGowan), Jones went to Europe. He traveled first to Florence, where he sought vainly to join the art school conducted by the English stage designer Edward Gordon Craig. While there he completed an unusual stage design for Shelley's The Cenci that later was highly praised by New York art critics when it was exhibited there.
Jones then went to Berlin and was accepted for a year of informal study and observation at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. It was there that Jones became immersed in the theories and techniques of the "new stage-craft" - a European movement that sought to unify production, direction, acting, design, and lighting into one artistically coordinated whole.
Jones returned to New York in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, and entered designs for The Merchant of Venice in an exhibit of theater art at the Stage Society of New York; he was subsequently asked to design the single set for the society's production of Anatole France's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. This set, imaginative and simple, received high critical acclaim for its break with the traditional realism of the Broadway stage. Jones also improvised from scrap materials a setting for Lord Dunsany's The Glittering Gate, the first production of the Washington Square Players (which later became the Theatre Guild), and in the summer of 1915 he did the scenic designs for the newly formed Provincetown Players at their makeshift playhouse on Cape Cod.
The prominent Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins had greatly admired Jones's set for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, and in the fall of 1915 he hired Jones to do the sets for his production of Edith Ellis's The Devil's Garden. Thus began Jones's legendary association with Hopkins, for whom, over the next nineteen years, he designed the sets and usually the costumes for thirty-nine plays, among them The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, Redemption (with John Barrymore), Swords (the first play by Sidney Howard). During this period Jones also collaborated with Joseph Urban in the design of a vast "community masque, " Caliban by the Yellow Sands, done for the New York City Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration in Lewisohn Stadium, and did the sets for a Metropolitan Opera production of a Nijinsky ballet, Til Eulenspiegel. He also began directing, first a modest production of Simon the Cyrenian for the Colored Players, an early all-black company, and then, in collaboration with James Light, The Spook Sonata for the new Experimental Theater in Provincetown that he, Kenneth MacGowan, and Eugene O'Neill had organized as an outgrowth of the Provincetown Playhouse. He continued to direct and design as well as produce with this group for several years, doing O'Neill's Welded, All God's Chillun Got Wings, The Great God Brown, and Desire Under the Elms.
In the spring of 1922, Jones toured Europe with MacGowan to collect material for a book, Continental Stagecraft, on which they collaborated, and in 1925 he published Drawings for the Theater, a richly representative collection of his designs. Jones did the stage designs for the inaugural program of the Radio City Music Hall in 1932 and served briefly as its art director. He also produced, designed, and directed a production of Dumas's Camille for the First Annual Play Festival at the old opera house in Central City, Colo. , in the summer of that year. He continued to work with the festival for the next ten years.
In 1934 he went to Hollywood, where he did the "color designs" for John Hay Whitney's new Technicolor production of Becky Sharp. He also designed a color production of The Dancing Pirate for Whitney's company. His ideas and efforts were of mixed effectiveness in that medium, and he did not do other films.
In the theater Jones was preeminent. He designed many productions for the Theatre Guild - including Mourning Becomes Electra, The Seagull, The Philadelphia Story, and Othello - and for the new Group Theatre. He produced and designed Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh's Romeo and Juliet, and he did the sets for Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30.
Jones's last significant work was on The Lute Song, a production, in three acts and seventeen scenes, of a classic Chinese play adapted by Sidney Howard and Will Irwin for the Theatre Guild in 1946. He worked for fourteen months on this project and achieved a progression of brilliantly impressionistic scenes in an Oriental storytelling fashion.
The last years of Jones's life were marred by illness that restricted his work. In 1953 he retired to the family home in Milton and died there the following Thanksgiving.
(The Dramatic Imagination is one of the few enduring works...)
Quotes from others about the person
Mordecai Gorelik said: "He was the founder of the whole present-day tradition of scene design in the United States. He had the gift of combining the lyrical with the dramatic, catching both at their peaks. He had an eternally boyish, zestful presence, an amused scorn of everything stuffy, a romanticism that was real to himself and that he made real to others. "
On June 21, 1933, Jones married Margaret Huston Carrington, a sister of Walter Huston; they had no children.