Summary
- David Jones was influenced by Welsh heritage, natural and cultural, the Pre-Raphaelites, 19th-century illustrators, and Paul Gauguin. WWI also had an crucial impact on his life and art.
- In 1921 Jones became a Roman Catholic and joined religious art and craft communities. The rural lifestyle impacted his numerous paintings of Welsh landscape.
- In his work he often combined his poetry with images, a route that resembles William Blake’s art.
- The mythological paintings like Guenever and Four Queens present his interest in medieval legends and style, as well as his attention to detail, which fills every part of the paintings.
- In The Anathemata Jones presented his theories in which art shared similarities with religion; his paintings with chalices and flowers carried a symbolic meaning of sacrifice and rebirth.
- Jones’ inscriptions are another example of his fascination of the relationship between image and word.
- Despite the acclaim from his contemporaries, Jones and his work still remain relatively unknown to a wider audience.
Early Work and Influences
David Jones, born in London in 1895, began drawing from an early age, mostly images of animals. In an interview for Contemporary Authors, he said
I began drawing when I was aged five and regarded it as a natural activity which I would pursue as I grew older.
Interview for Contemporary Authors
Throughout his life, Jones felt a strong affinity to his Welsh heritage; it deeply inspired his artistic and literary works, and his essays on aesthetics and culture, evoked through the language, history, landscapes, and myths of Wales.
From 1909–1914, Jones enrolled at Camberwell Art School, where he was taught by Reginald Savage and A. S. Hartrick. Jones called Savage a “certain civilizing influence,” crediting him with introducing him to artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites and other 19th-century illustrators, such as Fredrick Sandys and Aubrey Beardsley.1 Hartrick was an artist who had known and had worked with Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, when he was studying at the artistic colony of Pont-Aven in the 1880s.
The historical and medievalist narratives illustrated by Pre-Raphaelite and 19th-century artists, such as the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poetry (1857), were a major influence on Jones’s artwork of this period, in works such as Soldier and the Old Man (1914) and Lancelot and Guinevere (1916). In 1915, Jones enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as an infantryman and remained on the Western Front until 1918, making him the longest-serving British poet of World War I.
Photograph of David Jones. Goldmark.
Part of the course at Camberwell involved studying literature which inspired his interest in reading. Jones was an avid reader, reading widely, across all genres, styles, and forms, and in the 1920s, joined the Chelsea group, a reading and discussion group, who saw themselves as an alternative to the Bloomsbury group of Virginia Woolf’s circle. Together they read and discussed works by their contemporaries, including Pound, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence and particular works, featuring, Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The Waste Land, and works by Joyce, were important influences for Jones.
Creative Communities: Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin
In 1921 Jones met Eric Gill, an artist-craftsman, visiting him at his workshop at Ditchling Common, in Sussex. Later in 1921, Jones converted to Roman Catholicism, as Gill had done in 1913, and joined him at Ditchling Common as part of the Guild of Saints Joseph and Dominic, a Catholic art and craft community set up by Gill. The Guild retrieved the values of pre-industrial rural life and craftsmanship, through the belief in the necessity of creativity to everyday life and by uniting life, art, work, religion, and rural culture.
When Jones moved to Ditchling he became a carpenter’s apprentice. Jones claimed that carpentry had an enormous effect on his ideas about making things, including poetry. Carpentry is equated with the creation and the structuring of his poetry, a process which he viewed as a craft.
David Jones, Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin, 1925. © Tate, London 2024.
In 1924, Jones joined the Guild at Capel-y-ffin when Gill transferred the Ditchling community to the Black Mountains, in Breconshire, Wales. Jones loved the landscape and during this time at Capel, the longest time he spent in Wales, developed his watercolor and landscape paintings. In these paintings, he developed a personal vision of the Breconshire landscape which displays an affinity to artistic influences like Paul Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Cubism. This affinity can be seen in the use of color and stylization of the landscape in paintings such as Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin (1925). The landscape, imbued with religious symbols and a visual depiction of the crucifixion of Christ, is suggestive of holiness and the spirit of place, emphasizing Jones’ spiritual connection to the landscape.
Word and Image
The landscape of Capel-y-ffin and the border between England and Wales was also important in Jones’ writings, particularly in In Parenthesis (1937), Jones’s first published poem. In Parenthesis explores Jones’s own lived experiences of World War I and his religious conversion; the poem draws upon ancient Welsh heroic epic and myth, Arthurian legends, and Classical antiquities, using the material, like Eliot’s The Waste Land, to collate a series of references, historical texts and imaginative sources through which to explore the present. In this way, Jones presented images of cultural breakdown and the moral uncertainty of the war.
Jones was clearly very aware of his visual and literary influences, both Modernist and earlier, and of how he used them. He notes how his contemporaries are both modern and respond to, or work with tradition, and preceding literary and cultural movements. Jones was influenced by the liberation and experimentation that Modernist work offered but remained in touch with more traditional and historical practices, both as a poet and artist.
David Jones, Frontispiece to In Parenthesis, 1937. © Trustees of the David Jones Estate/ Bridgeman Images.
Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.
Jones produced a frontispiece and a tailpiece for In Parenthesis (1937); he regarded the frontispiece as being vital to the poem. It depicts the protagonist, Private John Ball, an infantryman in the trenches. The man has one shoe missing and most of his clothes are torn away. With the tonally darker background, the soldier merges with it, becoming one with the landscape which is filled with symbols and subtext which is interconnected to the poem.
The frontispiece demonstrates Jones’s fascination with the relationship between word and image in his writings, paintings, engravings, and inscriptions. The originality of his work and the way in which he combined word and image has often led to comparisons with the poet-artist William Blake (whom Jones also admired). For Jones, painting and poetry were interlinked and augment one another.
Arthurian Legends
Jones’ visual and literary works, and his own process of creativity, were like processes of archaeological and artistic excavations, in which he explored ancient objects, forms, details, and connections. In his works, each word or sign signified layers of associations, meanings, and traditions. Jones saw “the principle that informs the poetic art” as “something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matière, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product.”2 Jones’ own practice as an artist and poet, as well as his writings on art and culture, reveal his fascination with excavating connections and associations of meaning and the civilizational changes that comprise his present cultural phase.
Jones’ visual work uses historical allusions and a “passion for archaeological detail,” seen in mythological and legendary paintings such as Guenever (1938–1940) and The Four Queens find Lancelot Sleeping (1941).3 In these later mythological paintings, Jones paid equal attention to detail in all areas of the image, conveying all the details of the background as well as the foreground of the painting. The two works portray the Arthurian legends of Lancelot and Guinevere, taken from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’ Arthur (1485). These paintings are simultaneously modern, and medieval in style, with their profusion of highly defined detail, and the centrality of the lovers who are placed disproportionately to the background or merge into it.
David Jones, Illustration to the Arthurian Legend: Guenever, 1938–1940 © Tate, London 2024.
Guenever depicts the moment in which Lancelot enters Guinevere’s chamber (Malory XIX, 6). Guinevere, lying naked, is surrounded by sleepers, and Lancelot enters through a barred window on the right, but he is hard to see, blending in with the walls and windows. Lancelot’s inclined head and cross-legged pose echo the pose of Christ on the crucifix hanging above Guinevere’s head on the left-hand side of the picture. Guinevere’s bed corresponds to the altar behind her, as her bed sits between two candles and a crucifix. The profusion of details, symbols, and allusions within the painting creates both a claustrophobic environment, enhancing Guinevere’s confinement, and a surreal dream-like space.
David Jones, The Four Queens find Lancelot Sleeping, 1941 © Tate, London 2024.
Similarly, this dream-like space is shown in Jones’ second Malory watercolor painting Four Queens, depicting Morgan Le Fay and three other enchantresses and queens who are contending for Lancelot’s love (Malory, VI, 3). Lancelot is the reclining figure, shown to be withstanding their enchantments and their attempted seductions. In this image, the landscape is both ancient, with the ruined chapel, ancient stones, and horses on the hills, and modern, recalling the battlefields of World War I. Lancelot is wearing a helmet, recalling the soldiers of World War I, and in this respect, has an affinity with the frontispiece of In Parenthesis.
Art and Religion
The Anathemata (1952), set within a Catholic mass, explores Jones’ faith and his own artistic philosophy whilst tracing various traditions of British and European history and culture, which are united within the image and rite of the Mass. Alongside his essays, The Anathemata set out Jones’s artistic theories in which art shares similarities with religious signification and is aligned to Christian systems and rituals.
For Jones, art represented something that is significant of something greater, holding material and spiritual meanings. In The Anathemata, this is represented through the sign of eucharist, where the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the Catholic faith. Jones was concerned with art as a sacred, “essentially a sign-making or ‘sacramental’ activity.”4 In Jones’ view, as outlined in his Preface to The Anathemata, and in other essays, the artist and the poet dealt wholly with signs: how the artist-poet recalls, represents, and orders these signs to create a “now-ness,” making them relevant to the artist-poet and the culture that made them.5
David Jones, Chalice with Flowers, 1949.
Between 1949 and 1954, Jones produced a series of watercolor and mixed-media paintings of chalices and flowers. They are highly symbolic images, evoking a subtle and ephemeral beauty, with glass chalices displaying a geometrical arrangement of flowers, thorns, and stems.
The images visually demonstrate his notion of sign-making and the religious signification of The Anathemata. The translucent glass chalices holding the water signify life and baptism. The intertwined flowers and thorns growing out of the chalice, with allusion to the Passion of Christ, are signs and symbols of regeneration, sacrifice, rebirth, or awakening.
Jones continued to refine his artistic theories, in essays such as Art and Sacrament, which were published in a collection called Epoch and Artist (1959). In a 1965 interview with his friend, Saunders Lewis, Jones discussed how his faith, and various inspirations and experiences, inform his artistic, literary practices and aesthetic theories:
In his inscriptions, Jones explored sign-making and sacramentalism, visually, through words; again, demonstrating in a different way, his fascination of the relationship between image and word. His inscription QUIA PER INCARNATI (1953) translates from the Latin as “For by the mystery of the Word made flesh the light of thy glory has shone anew upon the eyes of our mind.” The words and their visuality in colors of green, ochre, black, and gold, emphasize the material and spiritual qualities of word and language, and their transformative possibilities.
David Jones, QUIA PER INCARNATI, 1953 © The Estate of David Jones / Bridgeman Images. Photo: Kettle’s Yard.
Final Years
Jones’ last collection of poems, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments, was published in 1974, the year of Jones’ death. As one of Jones’ last poems, The Sleeping Lord depicts his mythological, historical, literary, and ecological preoccupations. It traces the genealogy of Arthurian legend from Celtic sources and Welsh origins through to Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and 19th-century portrayals, such as those by Alfred Tennyson. He unites these preoccupations into one central image: the Sleeping Lord. The Sleeping Lord, resting within the Welsh landscape, is simultaneously the landscape itself, a mythic giant, Jesus, and King Arthur. Some shorter poems and essays were collected after his death and printed posthumously, The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (1978), and The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences (1981).
During his lifetime, creative practitioners from various artistic disciplines admired Jones as an artist and writer. In the 1960s art historians Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark called Jones “one of the greatest writers of our time” and “the best living painter.” The composer Igor Stravinsky thought him “perhaps the greatest living writer in English,” while in 1974, Hugh MacDiarmid pronounced Jones “the greatest native British poet of the century.” Dylan Thomas claimed “I would like to have done anything as good as David Jones.”6
Despite the acclaim from his contemporaries, Jones and his work still remain relatively unknown to a wider audience and readership. This may be due, in part, to his being labelled as difficult to read and to understand, with his work encompassing wide ranges of vocabulary, reference, and meaning.
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in Jones, with exhibitions of his artworks, the publication of Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory (2015), Thomas Dilworth’s biography David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (2017) and reassessments of Jones’ work, such as editions published by the Modernist Archive Project, David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose (2018) and David Jones’s The Grail Mass and Other Works (2019).
Jones’ “excavating” practice was part of his uniqueness as he delved deeper into the layers behind each image, symbol and word, its origins and its use of over time. He had more of an archaeological awareness of history and time that went further back than other painters and writers. However, he was always conscious of “nowness” and how to innovate tradition, history and language, making him an original and unique artist and writer, whose written and visual work is rewarding to read, view, and explore.
Author’s Bio
Hannah Comer is an independent researcher, writer and yoga instructor. Hannah has a PhD in which her research focused on the Pre-Raphaelite Legacy in Modernism, specifically on the works of W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and David Jones. She also enjoys painting and drawing.
