Early Life and Schooling
Robert Edmond Jones was born in Milton, New Hampshire on December 12, 1887. He graduated high school in 1905, and began attending Harvard University in the fall of the following year. He graduated cum laude in 1910 and stayed at the school as a graduate student and then as a fine arts instructor until 1912. After that he went to New York and worked a string of inconsequential jobs before travelling to Europe with the hope of studying under one of New Stagecraft’s founding fathers, Edward Gordon Craig. His hopes were dashed after he was not accepted to the program, so he instead went to Florence and designed for Shelley’s The Cenci. After this he studied in Berlin for a year at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater as an unofficial student. After World War I began he travelled back to the states where he began his long career designing for the stage and film.
First Years and Initial Notoriety and Success
He designed a few small shows initially, and then was catapulted into the public eye with his design for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. After that he became a professional designer of all trades, doing scenic design work, lighting design work, and prop and costume design. On many shows he would do all of them at once, and after going the Provincetown Players in their early years as one of their first members, he also worked as a director. It was with the Players that Jones met many of the most prominent names in American Theatre at the time, including Eugene O'Neill. Jones and O'Neill worked very closely for many years and produced some of his most well-known plays, including Desire Under the Elms and The Iceman Cometh. Form 1933 to 1935 Jones went to Hollywood and helped produce the first three-color Technicolor films, but stopped and decided to devote the rest of his career to theatre. In 1941 in published what would come to be regarded as his "thesis" on stage design and the modern theatre, The Dramatic Imagination.
Psychoanalysis and Meeting Carl Jung
Jones had always been interested by psychoanalysis and its principals. In 1926 he went to switzerland to undergo psychoanalysis by Carl Jung. Some day that the trip was meant as a way for Jones to deal with or "cure" his hidden homosexuality, but that is just speculation. What is known is that the trip did impact his work and artistic vision. New Stagecraft had already been interested in simplifying settings and objects, but now Jones began to put more specifically symbolic weight onto set pieces and props. He also started talking more about the subconscious and conscious levels of the theatre, which I go into more detail about in the "Vision" section of this website.
Jones continued to design with increasing fame for both theatre and cinema up until a few years before his death in November 1954.