This paper proposes a new Shewhart‐type control chart for circular or directional data. This type of data is found in several fields and applications, such as wind direction, the arrival time of a patient in a hospital, and the route of animals. The proposal is based on the Jones–Pewsey distribution, which is a very flexible three‐parameter distribution for modeling processes that can be represented as points on the circumference of the unit circle. We conduct an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed control chart with some competitors considering individual measurements and the mean direction (nonindividual observations). The results show that the Jones–Pewsey control chart outperforms the competitors in terms of run length distribution analysis. Finally, we present and discuss two applications based on actual datasets to show the applicability of the proposed control chart.