A work of art is never an accident. (There are, of course, beautiful objects that are not works of art.) Talent is indispensable, and there is almost always a period of trying out during which the artist develops his skill. Sometimes, though, a person of talent produces great art on a maiden venture and sometimes, having accomplished work of merit, leaves off. Giuseppe di Lampedusa was 58 and had never written fiction when he started “The Leopard,” arguably the finest Italian novel of the 20th century. Charles Jones, a British photographer, is a similar marvel. The Howard Greenberg Gallery currently has up an eponymous display of 29 of Jones’s striking photographs of vegetables and fruits and flowers.

Charles Jones was a gardener. In a country where not just castles, but very modest homes have prized gardens, and where theories of landscape gardening correspond to political ideologies, a gardener is more than someone who comes around with a flatbed truck to mow the lawn. Not much is known about Jones, but he was evidently a very good gardener. He received a glowing notice in the Gardeners’ Chronicle of September 20, 1905, for his care of Ote Hall, a private estate in the parish of Wivelsfield near Burgess Hill, Sussex. Besides that, we know he was born in 1866, married in 1894, and died in 1959. But he was an intensely private person who left no diaries or other writings, and whose death as an old man was marked only by the few who knew him.

In 1981, the author and photographic collector Sean Sexton chanced upon a trunk at the Bermondsey antique market in London that contained several hundred exquisite gold-toned gelatin silver prints, about twothirds of vegetables, the rest of fruits and flowers. The exact name of each plant was written on the back of its picture, and most were signed “C.J.” A few had the photographer’s full name, Charles Jones. Who this Charles Jones was, how he had made himself into such an accomplished photographer, and why he never publicly shared with anyone the results of what had to have been a considerable effort, was a mystery, and mostly still is. What Sexton realized immediately, though, and what remains apparent, is that this was an extraordinary body of work.

“Bean Longpod,” like all these undated images, was probably shot around 1900, give or take five or 10 years. It is a portrait of a humble bean taken with the same attention accorded royals. A group of bean pods are shown standing vertically against a light backdrop, a few pods unopened. Beans seem to be cascading down the chute of the open pod. A few leaves are still attached at the top of the pods. That’s it. What makes the image extraordinary is the elegance of its simplicity, the detail on the surfaces of the beans, and the richness of its modeling. A work of art is never an accident: Jones knew what he was doing when he produced this photograph.

“Cucumber Ridge” illustrates Jones’s technique. Three cucumbers with some leaves still fast to their stems rest side by side on a white background, isolated. The three vegetables, looming presences, fill the frame, which immediately gives them stature. The lens Jones uses lets him get very close so the surface of the cucumbers — the bumps, the ribs, the texture of the skin, and the slight differences in color — is seen with great precision. A slow shutter speed allows for a delicate rendition of the variations in light and shade. And the gold toning gives the print warmth and depth; the patina of the surface is both archaic and timeless.

This technique is very sophisticated, hardly the practice of an amateur. But Jones shows mastery in all the extant prints. The same technique is used for “Turnip Green Globe,” “Tomato Ailsa Craig,” “Bean Runne,” “Pear Brockworth Park,” and all the rest. It does not become formulaic because each instance is invested with the attention needed to show its subject’s particularity.

One of the things that is manifest in all the pictures is that Jones loved what grew from the soil. There is something almost worshipful, certainly reverential, in his regard for the products of his garden. He knew them, and knew them as a man with dirt under his fingernails. The pictures of flowers — there are four of tulips and one of a Collerette Dahlia Pilot on display at Greenberg — are beautiful without being at all sentimental. This is very different from Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures of flowers, which are mawkishly romantic, the work of someone who experiences flowers at the florist’s. Jones may be in thrall to nature, but he expresses his devotion with a commitment to veracity.

A side room at the Greenberg gallery is given over to a dozen pictures that make interesting comparisons with Jones’s work: three images each by Karl Blossfeld, Dr. Dain Tasker, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. They show Jones to have been a modernist before modernism. The Weston photographs of peppers, dated 1927, 1929, and 1930, will be the most familiar, and are in fact quite similar. But Weston seems more interested in using the peppers to create soft-core erotica than in understanding them as vegetables.

In “Plant Kingdoms,” a 1999 book of Charles Jones’s photographs, there is a picture of him taken in 1904. He is a man in his late 30s leaning against a wooden column with his legs crossed, and one hand in his pants pocket. He is wearing a smart suit, a weskit with a gold chain, a wing collar with a bow tie, and a snappy straw boater. He has a handsome face with a neatly trimmed full beard. His eyes are focused in the distance, but his gaze seems inward. Something is cooking inside. Can it be the photographs he labors over privately and stores in a trunk, work so dear to him he cannot bring himself to share it with anyone?

wmeyers@nysun.com

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