David Michael Jones CH ( David Walter Jones; 1 November 1895 – 28 October 1974) was a British painter and modernist poet. As a painter he worked mainly in watercolour on portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and inscription painter. In 1965, Kenneth Clark took him to be the best living British painter, while both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden put his poetry among the best written in their century. Jones's work gains form from his Christian faith and Welsh heritage.
Biography
Early life
Jones was born at Arabin Road, Brockley, Kent, now a suburb of South East London, and later lived in nearby Howson Road. His father, James Jones, was born in Flintshire in north Wales, to a Welsh-speaking family, but he was discouraged from speaking Welsh by his father, who believed that habitual use of the language might hold his child back in a career. James Jones moved to London to work as a printer's overseer for the Christian Herald Press. He met and married Alice Bradshaw, a Londoner, and they had three children: Harold, who died at 21 of tuberculosis, Alice and David.
Jones exhibited artistic promise at an early age, even entering drawings for exhibitions of children's artwork. He wrote that he knew from the age of six he would devote his life to art. He did not read fluently until the age of eight. From the very earliest years of his life he had already come to identify intensely with his paternal heritage: as an old man in 1971, he would write to Saunders Lewis of a 'passionate conviction that I belonged to my father's nation that I certainly felt by the time I was seven'. In 1909, at 14, he entered Camberwell Art School, where he studied under A. S. Hartrick, who had worked with Van Gogh and Gauguin and introduced him to the work of the Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites. In addition, Jones studied literature, the subject of a mandatory one-hour weekly class at Camberwell. Jones spent more time on the front line (117 weeks) than any other British writer in the war. He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in the Midlands, was returned to the Ypres Salient, and joined in the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele in 1917. He nearly died of trench fever in 1918, but recovered in England and was stationed in Ireland until the armistice of 11 November 1918. From Camberwell, he followed Walter Bayes to the Westminster School of Art in central London, where he studied under him and with Bernard Meninsky, and was influenced by Walter Sickert, an occasional lecturer there, whom he came to know personally. Jones received instruction towards becoming a Catholic from Fr. John O'Connor, who suggested Jones visit Eric Gill and his guild of Catholic craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex. Influenced by Gill, Jones entered the Catholic Church in 1921, chiefly, he said, because it seemed "real" in contrast to Christian alternatives. He also liked the Church's continuity with Classical antiquity. In 1930 eye-strain forced him to give up engraving.
In 1924 Jones had become engaged to marry Gill's daughter Petra, but in 1927 she broke off the engagement to marry a mutual friend. Distressed, Jones concentrated on art. Petra's long neck and high forehead continued as female features in his artwork. He returned to live with his parents at Brockley, also spending time at a house they rented on the coast at Portslade. He painted prolifically and exhibited watercolour seascapes and Welsh landscapes in London galleries. In 1927 Jones made friends with Jim Ede, at the Tate Gallery, who introduced him to art critics and prospective buyers, including Helen Sutherland, who became a patron. Ede introduced him to the painter Ben Nicholson, who in 1928 had Jones elected to the Seven and Five Society, whose other members included Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Nicholson, Cedric Morris, Christopher Wood, and Henry Moore. Jones remained a member until 1935, when he was expelled by Nicholson for not painting abstracts.
thumb|The grave of David Jones and his parents in the London Borough of Lewisham's 'Ladywell Cemetery'.
Art
Although Jones began exhibiting paintings in London galleries in 1919, his chief public creative expression was initially engraving. Soon after learning how to engrave, he entered the vanguard of the renewal of wood-engraving as an artform (instead of the reproductive craft it had been through most of the 19th century). He was among the first modern engravers to combine white-line and black-line engraving. His two acknowledged masterpieces of book illustration are The Chester Play of the Deluge (1927) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1929). In both of these, engravings mirror one another in design and are arranged in the text to form a chiasmic structure. Jones would use this structure to give unifying symbolic form to his epic-length poem, The Anathemata. After reading and rereading it for six months, W. H. Auden called it "probably the greatest poem of the twentieth century" and compared it to the inclusive, culturally authoritative long poems of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and Milton. Jones thought it was "worth 50 'In Parentheses'" and the most important of any work he had done. notably War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme on the BBC. Since 2014 Jones has increasingly been seen as an original, major poet and visual artist of the 20th century.
Judging from its rapidly rising prices, Jones's visual art is now fairly well and widely appreciated. Several notable exhibitions of his engravings, paintings and inscriptions, during his life and since, have attested to the popularity of his visual art, most recently Vision and Memory at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. His visual works can now be seen online, in talks on Jones by Dilworth and films directed by Derek Sheil such as David Jones Innovation and Consolidation.
Jones has been less appreciated as a poet, partly because his long, highly allusive poetic works are hard reading for many. Although In Parenthesis received positive reviews in 1937 and won the Hawthornden Prize in 1938, reader interest was cut short by the Second World War, which eclipsed interest in the earlier war. Until recently, In Parenthesis and The Anathemata have been missing from most academic studies of literary modernism. The fault is their publisher, Faber, which from the start failed to list them as poems or Jones as among its poets. (The Anathemata was strangely listed under Autobiographies and Memoirs.) Not until 1970, after complaints by William Cookson, editor of Agenda, and Stuart Montgomery, editor of The Fulcrum Press, did Faber correct the error, long after the Modernist canon had been established, largely by the American New Critics. Since 1970, academic assessment of Jones's poetry has been catching up with his reputation as a visual artist. But the process was initially stalled by Paul Fussell's judgement against In Paraenthesis in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), as glorifying war by alluding to romance, a judgement that continues to discourage scholarly engagement, even though repeatedly effectively refuted. And the liturgical allusions and eucharistic focus in his later poetry do not appeal to most academics, who are secular-minded. The voices calling attention to his poetry have mainly been those of creative practitioners rather than academics. T. S. Eliot saw Jones as "of major importance", "one of the most distinguished writers of my generation." Dylan Thomas said, "I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones." In 1974 Hugh MacDiarmid pronounced Jones "the greatest native British poet of the century." In 1965, Igor Stravinsky thought him "perhaps the greatest living writer in English". The art historian Herbert Read called him in 1964 "one of the greatest writers of our time".