Biography
Paul Cornwall-Jones (b. Pesahwar, Pakistan 1936 - d. Bath, UK 2018), a renowned fine art print publisher, studied architecture at Jesus College, Cambridge. There, in 1960, he and a fellow undergraduate, Michael Deakin, formed Editions Alecto, publishing topographic prints of Oxbridge colleges and public schools by artists such as John Piper and Julian Trevelyan. In 1962 he moved to London, and set up offices in Kensington, where his focus shifted to a new generation of emerging artists. He met David Hockney, then still at the Royal College of Art, who showed him a series of 16 etchings he was working on, called A Rake’s Progress, an edition of whch was bequeathed through the Contemporary Art Society to The Whitworth, University of Manchester. Cornwall-Jones offered the young artist the then unheard of sum of £5,000 to publish an edition of 50. Alecto was soon publishing prints by some of the best British artists of the time, including Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Allen Jones and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as Americans such as Jine Dine, Roy Licthenstein and Claes Oldenburg. Yet, Cornwall-Jones left Alecto and set up Peterburg Prsss in 1968. He had sy=tidios in Portobello Raod, London and New York. He worked with Marcel Duchamp in the last year of his life and later Francesco Clemente, Jasper Johns, RB Kitaj, Henry Moore, Rene Ricard, James Rosenquist, Dieter Roth and Frank Stella, among others.
