David Jones

David Jones, CH, CBE (1895-1974) made Christmas cards from the age of at least eight. His Welsh printer father replicated the work encouraged by Jones’ artistic Cockney mother and sent them out from their London suburb home. It was a practice Jones continued as an adult. Animals were often part of these festive images, being of life-long fascination for Jones and primary subjects of his earliest studies – his leopards and bears from the ages of 5 and 6 still captivate viewers today. His early attraction to history, language, myths, and legends meant that these too became integral aspects of his artistic expression. When Jones converted from low Anglicanism to Catholicism as a young adult, he became very intentional in thinking through the implications of faith for art, adding a whole new dimension to his experience and expression of artistry. In response to this he joined the Catholic artisan Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, Sussex, and then later followed Eric Gill to another lay community, Cael-y-ffin in the Black Mountains of Wales. Here he reconnected with the mythic land of his ancestry. Modernist as Jones was – and for a time member of the Seven and Five Society – he was completely unabashed about the centrality of his faith for his person, his images, his writing. In 1937 he published In Parenthesis, an epic poem shaped by his experiences in WWI, which T.S. Eliot called a work of genius. W.H. Auden called his other epic, The Anathemata (1957), “very probably the finest long poem written in English this century.” (The quotations by Jones in the piece above come from this poem.) Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Thomas, Seamus Heany are amongst the many who proffered similar approbation throughout Jones’ career. Jones was very much an artist of text and image both – whether painting, drawing, engraving, or writing. In addition to his many individual visual works, he illustrated numerous books, such as his wood engravings for Gulliver’s Travels, The Book of Jonah and The Chester Play of the Deluge and his much-lauded copper engravings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In his later years Jones spent time more studiously merging text and image into one. Renewed interest in his whole corpus of work has led to a recent increase in both exhibitions and academic material on Jones (see below).“I should like to speak of a quality which I rather associate with the folk-tales of Welsh or Celtic derivation, a quality congenial and significant to me […]. I find it impossible to define, but it has to do with a certain affection for the intimate creatureliness of things – a care for, and appreciation of, the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals, and yet withal a pervading sense of metamorphosis and mutability. That trees are men walking. That words “bind and loose material things.” David Jones