David Jones
born Nov. 1, 1895, Brockley,
Kent, Eng.
died Oct. 28, 1974, London
English artist of great originality and
sensitivity. He was also a writer
distinguished for complex poetic prose works
of epic scope.
His father was a native of Holywell,
Flintshire, Wales, and from his father Jones
drew a sense of Welsh identity and an
interest in Welsh language and culture.
Jones attended the Camberwell School of Art
in London (1910–14), and during World War I
he served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
After the war he was for a time a member of
the community of Roman Catholic craftsmen
that gathered around the sculptor Eric Gill
at Ditchling in England. Jones’s earliest
work as an engraver shows Gill’s influence,
as do the lettered inscriptions, at once
poetry and visual art, in which he was
unrivalled. From about 1927 he worked
chiefly in watercolour. His animal drawings
and still lifes are of great beauty, and he
also painted portraits, but most
characteristic are his landscapes and
seascapes, which incorporate human or animal
figures or elaborately accurate ships and
boats, illustrative of Welsh and Christian
mythological and heroic themes.
Jones became known as a writer after
making his reputation as a painter. In 1921
he had become a Roman Catholic, and the
Latin liturgy is one of the thematic strands
that run through all his work, along with
the army and Welsh and British history and
legend. His experience of war in the
trenches gave him the theme of In
Parenthesis (1937), an epic novel. Also
important is his religious poem The
Anathemata (1952).
