David Jones (painter): Difference between revisions

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|image = David Jones (artist, poet).jpg

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|birth_name = Walter David Jones

|birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1895|11|1}}

|death_place = [[Harrow, London|Harrow]], England

|occupation = Poet, artist, essayist, critic

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|alma_mater =

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==Biography==

===Early life===

 

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. By nine years of age, he identified with his father's Welsh background and dropped his Anglo-Saxon first name Walter. In 1909, at 14, he entered [[Camberwell College of Arts|Camberwell Art School]], where he studied under [[Archibald Standish Hartrick|A. S. Hartrick]], who had worked with [[Van Gogh]] and [[Gauguin]] and introduced him to the work of the [[Impressionist]]s and [[Pre-Raphaelite]]s. In addition, Jones studied literature, the subject of a mandatory one-hour weekly class at Camberwell.<ref name="Engraver"/>

 

===World War I===

 

===1920s===

 

 

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.<ref name=RowanW>{{Cite web |author=Rowan Williams |author-link=Rowan Williams |url=http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/everything-illuminated-rowan-williams-art-and-faith-david-jones |title=Everything is illuminated: Rowan Williams on the art and faith of David Jones |date=25 March 2017 |access-date=1 April 2017 |work=[[New Statesman]]}}</ref> 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.<ref name="Engraver"/> Disappointed by published accounts of personal combat experience during the war, in 1928 he began writing ''In Parenthesis'', a fictional work based on his own experiences in the trenches. He was now in love with Prudence Pelham, who was its muse.

Jones spent most of the Second World War in London, enduring the [[The Blitz|Blitz]]. He painted a few important pictures, and to celebrate the wedding of his friend Harman Grisewood to Margaret Bailey, wrote ''Prothalamion'' and ''Epithalamion'', which were eventually published posthumously.

 

 

In 1954 an Arts Council tour of his work visited [[Aberystwyth]], [[Cardiff, Wales|Cardiff]], [[Swansea]], [[Edinburgh]] and the [[Tate Gallery, London]].

 

 

===Death===

 

==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 second epic-length poem, ''The Anathemata''.<ref name="Colereidge"/>

 

 

==Poetry ==

''[[In Parenthesis]]'' (1937) is an epic narrative poem based on Jones's first seven months in the trenches culminating in the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. It is a dense mixture of polyphonic of voices, varying in register, in verse and prose-lines. The richness of its language establishes it as poetry, which is what Jones considered it. His literary debut, it won high praise from reviewers, many of them former servicemen, for whom its vivid language evoked the realities of trench warfare. They saw its allusions to the horrors of romance and to the battles of history and legend (all seen as defeats) as accurately expressing the feelings of men in combat. The poem draws on literary influences from the 6th-century Welsh epic ''[[Y Gododdin]]'' to Shakespeare's ''[[Henry V (play)|Henry V]]'', [[Thomas Malory]]'s ''[[Morte d'Arthur]]'', the poetry of [[Gerard Manley Hopkins]] and ''Anabase'' by [[Saint-John Perse]] (translated by Eliot), in an attempt to be true to the experiences of combatants. The cumulative force is emotionally powerful. That and the reader's having got to know the infantrymen involved makes the concluding visitation of the dead by the Queen of the Woods a deeply moving literary experience. On 11 July 1937 when he met Jones, [[William Butler Yeats|W. B. Yeats]] elaborately praised ''In Parenthesis''. T. S. Eliot considered it "a work of genius". [[W. H. Auden]] declared it "the greatest book about the First World War." The war historian Michael Howard called it "the most remarkable work of literature to emerge from either world war." Graham Greene in 1980 thought it "among the great poems of the century." In 1996 the poet and novelist Adam Thorpe said "it towers above any other prose or verse memorial of ... any war." [[Herbert Read]] called it "one of the most remarkable literary achievements of our time." It is probably the greatest literary work on war in English.<ref name="Engraver"/>

 

 

Until 1960, Jones worked intermittently on a long poem, of which material in ''The Anathemata'' had initially been meant to form part. Jones used sections of the left-over material mainly in the magazine ''[[Agenda (poetry journal)|Agenda]]'' and collected it in ''The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments'' (1974). A posthumous volume of the unseen material was edited by [[Harman Grisewood]] and René Hague and published by Agenda Editions as ''The Roman Quarry''. It has since been re-edited by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison in ''The Grail Mass'' (Bloomsbury 2018). In these drafts, the monologue material of Judas and Caiaphas has a quality that certainly deserved to be published by Jones in his lifetime.

 

==References==

 

==Further reading==

 

==External links==

{{portal|Poetry}}

 

*[http://www.guildjosephdominic.org.uk/index.php/david-jones/ Biography of Jones on the website of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic]

*[http://www.david-jones-society.org The David Jones Society]. Retrieved 10 March 2017

*[http://ltmrecordings.com/artistsriflesaudioCD.html ''Artists Rifles'' audiobook liner notes on Jones]

[[Category:1895 births]]

[[Category:1974 deaths]]

[[Category:Alumni of Camberwell College of Arts]]

[[Category:Alumni of the Westminster School of Art]]

[[Category:Bollingen Prize recipients]]

[[Category:British Army personnel of World War I]]

[[Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism]]

[[Category:Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour]]

[[Category:People from Brockley]]

[[Category:Royal Welch Fusiliers soldiers]]

[[Category:Welsh Roman Catholics]]

[[Category:Writers who illustrated their own writing]]