David Jones (artist-poet)

Jones was born on 1 November 1895 in Arabin Road, Brockley, Kent, now a suburb of South East London, and later lived in nearby Howson Road. His father, James Jones, had been born in Flintshire in north Wales, to a Welsh-speaking family but was discouraged from speaking Welsh by his father, who, in common with many Welsh-speaking parents of the time, believed that habitual use of the language might hold his child back in his career. James Jones had moved to London to work as a printer's overseer for the Christian Herald Press, and it was here that he had met his wife, Alice, a Londoner born and bred. They had three children: Harold (who died at 19 of tuberculosis), Alice, and David.

Jones exhibited artistic promise at an early age, even entering drawings into exhibitions of children's artwork. He wrote that from the age of six he knew that he would devote his life to art, although he did not read fluently until the age of eight. In 1909, at 14, he persuaded his parents to allow him to abandon traditional schooling and enter Camberwell Art School. There he studied under A. S. Hartrick, who had worked with Van Gogh and Gauguin, Reginald Savage and Herbert Cole and introduced him to work of the Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites. In addition, Jones developed a knowledge of literature, which it was mandatory to study at Camberwell.[2]

With the outbreak of the First World War, Jones enlisted into the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and served on the Western Front from 1915 to 1918 with the 38th (Welsh) Division.[3] His experiences in the trenches were to prove important in his later painting and poetry, especially his involvement in the fighting at Mametz Wood.[4] Jones spent more time on the front line than any other British writeR of the war. He was wounded at Mametz Wood, and spent some time recuperating in the Midlands, before returning to the Ypres Salient and participating in the attack on Pilckem Ridge in 1917. The consequences of this long period in the trenches on Jones's health were slow to emerge.[2]

In 1919 he won a Government grant to study again at Camberwell Art School.[4] From Camberwell, he followed its headmaster, Walter Bayes, to the Westminster School of Art in central London, where he studied under Bayes and Bernard Meninsky. The school was close to Westminster Cathedral, which Jones often visited to participate in Mass and to view the Stations of the Cross by Eric Gill.[2] In 1921 he became a Roman Catholic and in 1922 he joined Eric Gill's Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic at Ditchling, Sussex, but not as a guild member.[5] There Desmond Chute taught him to engrave in wood. In 1923 he first worked as an illustrator, for The Game published by Gill and H. Pepler. He returned to London in 1924, but in 1925 often visited Gill at Capel-y-ffin and the Benedictines at Caldey Island, near Tenby, and in the same year did illustrations for Gulliver's Travels for the Golden Cockerel Press.

In 1927 Jones returned to live full-time with his parents at Brockley, although he continued to move between Capel and Caldey, and spent time on the coast at Portslade. He was painting prolifically in this period, and exhibited seascapes and drawings of Wales at the St George's gallery. He also joined the Society of Wood Engravers. The following year he visited Salies-de-Béarn in France with the Gills. In 1929 he exhibited at the Goupil gallery, including watercolor landscapes of France. From 1928 to 1935 he was a member of the Seven and Five Society, becoming well acquainted with Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Jim Ede and many other associated artists and collectors.[6]

In 1932 the underlying stresses and memories from his time in trenches, and which were revisited in the course of writing the first draft of In Parenthesis, took a heavy toll, and Jones suffered a severe nervous breakdown.[3] This prevented him from painting for several years, and delayed publication of In Parenthesis by several years.[7]

Jones's works were shown at Chicago in 1933, the Venice Biennale in 1934 and the World's Fair, New York, in 1939. In 1937 Faber finally published, In Parenthesis. The following year this epic poem won the Hawthornden Prize, at the time the only major British literary award. In 1944 an exhibition of his art work toured Britain.

In 1947 Jones suffered a second nervous breakdown while staying with Helen Sutherland at Cockley Moor. Treatment he received in a nursing home near Harrow left him stronger in body and spirit – with the help of a therapist who encouraged him to paint and draw as part of the healing process.[8]

In 1952 Jones published The Anathemata, a dramatic-symbolic anatomy of Western culture he had worked on for some years. In 1954 an Arts Council tour of his work visited Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Swansea, Edinburgh and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1974 he published The Sleeping Lord, a collection of poems.

Having been frail and ill for at least a decade,[9] Jones died in a nursing home in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1974. He was buried in Ladywell and Brockley Cemetery.

After the war, Jones entered the Westminster School of Art, where he developed an interest in Post-Impressionism and studied under the British artist Walter Sickert, among other influential teachers. He also became increasingly attracted by Roman Catholicism, and in 1921 he converted, choosing "Michael" as his confirmation name. The priest who received Jones into the Church, Father John O'Connor (in fact the model for G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown character), suggested that he contact the Catholic artist Eric Gill. Gill ran the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, based on the medieval guild model, in Ditchling, Sussex. Jones joined the guild and learned wood and copper engraving as well as experimenting with wood carving. Jones soon began producing book illustrations for the St. Dominic's Press, and he would later illustrate for the Golden Cockerel Press, for which he engraved the Cockerel itself in 1925.

Gill split with the Guild of SS. Joseph and Dominic and moved with his family and some followers to Capel-y-ffin in southern Wales, to pursue a rural way of life. Jones spent much of the years 1924 to 1927 visiting the Gills and assorted hangers-on in a rambling former monastery there. He had already become engaged to Gill's middle daughter, Petra, whose long neck and high forehead continued as standard female features in Jones's artwork for the rest of his career, even though his engagement to her ended in 1927.[10] Jones continued living in his family home in Brockley until the mid-1930s and some of his paintings depict the house and garden.

Jones's major illustrated books include wood engravings produced for editions of The Book of Jonah, The Chester Play of the Deluge, Aesop's Fables and Gulliver's Travels as well as for a Welsh translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Llyfr y Pregethwr. He produced an important group of copperplate engravings for an edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He also executed commissions for one-off engravings such as his illustration for T. S. Eliot's The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. He professed great disappointment in the way that his illustrations for Gulliver's Travels had been subsequently hand-coloured by art students, and complained about the too-light reproduction of the wood engravings for The Chester Play of The Deluge. Jones gave up engraving because of eye strain.

As a painter, his style changed over time from more free water colour landscapes, still lifes, and portraits to a unique mixture of pencil and water colour resulting in dense and busy works full of symbolism. His best-known paintings include early seascapes such as Manawydan's Glass Door and later works on legendary subjects, such as Trystan ac Esyllt (Tristan and Iseult).

He is also much admired for a genre that he invented later in life, which he termed "painted inscriptions". These drew on phrases and extracts from Welsh and Latin texts, and exert a continuing influence on calligraphers.[5]

It was not until 1937 that Jones published his first literary treatment of the conflict that would shape his life. Jones began seriously writing "In Parenthesis" in 1928, drawing on the first seven months of his experiences in the War, culminating in the attack and heavy casualties of his unit in Mametz Wood. In Parenthesis, which was published by Faber and Faber with an introduction by Jones's good friend and champion T. S. Eliot, is a dense mixture of verse and prose-lines but the richness of the language establishes it as poetry, which is how Jones himself considered it. Jones's literary debut won high praise from critics and from fellow-poets such as Eliot and W.B. Yeats, as well as garnering the Hawthornden Prize in the following year. Jones's style can be described as High Modernism; the poem draws on literary influences from the 6th-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin to Shakespeare's ''Henry V'', Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Anabase by Saint-John Perse (translated by Eliot) to try to make sense of the carnage he witnessed in the trenches. An extract from In Parenthesis read by Jones himself in 1967 appears on the audiobook CD Artists Rifles.

His next book, The Anathemata, appeared in 1952 (again published by Faber). Inspired in part by a visit to Palestine during which he was struck by the historic parallels between the British and Roman occupations of the region, the book draws on materials from early British history and mythology and the history and myths of the Mediterranean region.[10] The poem received largely positive reviews and was acclaimed by writers such as Herbert Read, W. H. Auden, Kathleen Raine and William Carlos Williams. Douglas Cleverdon produced dramatised readings of In Parenthesis and The Anathemata for the BBC Third Programme. A young Richard Burton took the lead role of Private John Ball, the protagonist of In Parenthesis.

Until 1960, Jones worked intermittently on a long poem, of which The Anathemata was intended to form part. Sections of the work were published mainly in the magazine Agenda, and in 1974 were published as The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (again by Faber). A posthumous volume of previously-unseen materials was edited by Harman Grisewood and René Hague and published by Agenda Editions as The Roman Quarry.

On 11 November 1985, Jones was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.[11] The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."[12]

In 2002, the text of three short poems was published for the first time in Wedding Poems, edited by Thomas Dilworth. Two of these poems ("Prothalamion" and "Epithalamion", amounting to 271 lines) had been written while Jones was living in London during the Blitz, for the marriage of Harman Grisewood to Margaret Bailey. The third poem, "The Brenner" (24 lines), had been written on 18 March 1940 to mark the meeting of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler on the Brenner Pass. According to their editor publication of these poems brought into print "all the known completed poetry by David Jones".

Jones wrote essays on art, literature, religion and history, and introductions to books that included a new edition of George Borrow's Wild Wales. He gave talks on the BBC Third Programme. He tried his hand at an extended consideration of Coleridge's narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for a reprint with a series of his copper engravings. His essays have appeared in three collections: Epoch and Artist (Faber, 1959), The Dying Gaul (Faber, 1978), and David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose (Bloomsbury, 2018).

The fullest exposition of David Jones's views on aesthetics and culture appears in his essay, "Art and Sacrament", included in Epoch and Artist, which explores the meaning of signs and symbols in daily life, relates them to Roman Catholic teachings such as transubstantiation, and argues that humans are the only animals to create "gratuitous" works, and thus creators analogous to God. He summed up these views in an essay, "Use and Sign" in The Dying Gaul.

David Jones was a complex artist and his achievements unusual in including admired and generally recognised works in the field of poetry and in the visual arts. However, the poet and critic Kathleen Raine pointed out that despite the supreme quality of his art... he has never at any time been a widely-read, still less a fashionable, writer, nor is he ever likely to become so for his work is too subtle and learned for popular tastes (Sewanee Review, 1967).

In 1938 T. S. Eliot called In Parenthesis a "work of genius"; Graham Greene in 1980 put it "among the great poems of the century". W. H. Auden termed The Anathemata "one of the most important poems of our time" and in 1977 "probably the finest long poem in English" of the 20th century. In 1962 Igor Stravinsky saw Jones as "perhaps the greatest living writer in English", and in 1964 Herbert Read called him "one of the greatest writers of our time". In 1974 he was made a Companion of Honour.[3]

Jones's reputation declined after his death in 1974. Artists who engaged with history and myth were not thought to be in tune with the times, in poetry or art. Literary references in painting were anathema.[9]

However, several exhibitions of David Jones's paintings were mounted during commemorations of the centenary of the First World War, notably Vision and Memory at Pallant House in Chichester.[13] Meanwhile much of his poetry was reissued and a rapid reassessment took place as new generations discovered his work. The impact of British television documentaries about the War Poets also brought him wider attention,[14] notably War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme on BBC TV, narrowed by Michael Sheen. Since 2014 Jones has again been recognised as original and important among poets and visual artists of the 20th century.[9][15][16][17]

• David Jones, Paul Hills (Editor), Tate Gallery, 1971.
• The Engravings of David Jones: A Survey, Douglas Cleverdon, Clover Hill Editions, 1981.
• Dai Greatcoat, a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters, Rene Hague (editor), Faber, 1980.
• David Jones: The Maker Unmade, Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, Seren, 1995.
• The Long Conversation, a Memoir of David Jones, William Blissett, Oxford, 1981.
• David Jones: Writer and Artist, Keith Alldritt, Constable, London, 2003, ISBN 1-84119-379-8
• Thomas Dilworth: David Jones : engraver, soldier, painter, poet, London : Jonathan Cape, 2017, ISBN 978-0-224-04460-8

• The David Jones Society. Retrieved 10 March 2017
• Artists Rifles audiobook liner notes on Jones
• In Search of David Jones: Artist, Soldier, Poet (2008) First documentary in a trilogy exploring Jones's early artistic development, his time in the First World War trenches and his becoming a poet.
• David Jones Between the Wars: The Years of Achievement (2012) Second documentary celebrating Jones's artistic and literary achievements during the interwar years.
• David Jones: Innovation and Consolidation (2014) Final documentary exploring Jones's life and work from the Second World War up to his death in 1974.
• Extract from Writer's World, a conversation between Jones and his friend the writer Saunders Lewis (1964)