".... David Jones was a master of the art of sideways looking. Many of his finest paintings are of glimpses through a window. A boat far out at sea viewed through flapping curtains; a secret downwards vista into a walled garden where two lovers meet. He craved the secure feeling of containment, “looking out at the world from a reasonably sheltered position”. In our age of the full frontal his nervy intellectualism has tended to make people resistant to his work.
"But he was an artist and a poet who in his own time attracted passionate admirers. Kenneth Clark, in the mid-1930s, was describing Jones as “the most gifted of all the young British painters”. TS Eliot regarded In Parenthesis, Jones’s modernist epic of the first world war, as “a work of genius”. Auden judged The Anathemata, published in 1957, as “very probably the finest long poem to be written in English this century.”
"In the first world war Jones enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, fighting on the western front for more than two years, longer than any other major poet of the war. This was certainly the most defining experience of his life. He served in the ranks, rejecting the suggestion of becoming an officer on grounds that he wasn’t “that sort of person”. He shared with Stanley Spencer, another artist for whom fighting in the war was a formative experience, the appreciation felt by the oddity, the social misfit, for the ordinary camaraderie of soldiery. Jones observed this as “the extreme tenderness of men in action to each other”.....
"Dai Greatcoat, Jones’s well-known image of the soldier in tin hat and belted overcoat, is an obvious self-portrait. He himself wore huge coats always, even in hot summer, as a kind of protective carapace like armour. But Greatcoat is also a more generalised image of soldiery through history. War is the recurring theme of his poetry. He saw the glory of it as well as all the suffering. ...."
"We need to view him as fundamentally a maker. He formed things with his hands as he shaped things in his mind, combining the visual and verbal with creative intensity not seen in Britain since the time of William Blake. There was little history of making in his background, except for his maternal grandfather, a mast and block maker in Rotherhithe. What he learned about skill and the religion of making he absorbed from Eric Gill, who became his father figure. Jones went to work with Gill at Ditchling in Sussex, welcomed into the community Gill had himself invented, “a religious fraternity for those who make things with their hands”.
"The first job Gill gave him was the painting of the lettering on the war memorial in the chapel of New College, Oxford – a suitable commission for someone who had seen so many comrades die in France. He responded to Gill’s discipline of workmanship, and his postwar agitation was gradually soothed in the nurturing atmosphere of Ditchling, with its homemade bread, home-killed pigs and handmade clothes, its comfortable Catholic women, demure girls and its recurring religious rituals, for which the craftsmen all downed tools and made off to the chapel. In 1922 Jones became engaged to Gill’s second daughter Petra, the skilled weaver.... [although the engagement was later broken].....
"In the mid 1920s Gill and his close entourage moved away from Ditchling to resettle at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. Jones went with them to the “land of enchantment”, the remote Welsh countryside he viewed romantically as the country of his forefathers. Although Jones was a suburban boy from Brockley, south-east London, his father, a printer, came originally from Holywell in Flintshire and liked to sing Welsh songs.
"In Wales, in that ancient mythic landscape of rolling hills and unexpected brooks, his work began to flourish independently of Gill’s, first with a series of copper engravings and then, still more impressively, with a whole sequence of watercolour landscapes of the country around Capel and the Caldy Island coastline. These wayward and mysterious Welsh landscapes infiltrate his poetry as well.
"It is no good defining him as a modernist painter. He was something much odder, defying categories. But in 1928 he was nominated by Ben Nicholson for membership of the Seven and Five Society, then London’s most progressive exhibiting organisation. Other members were Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, Henry Moore. He was taken up by Jim Ede, assistant to the Tate Gallery director and later the founder of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Through Ede, Jones met his great supporter Kenneth Clark.
"In the same year, Jones also began writing his war poem In Parenthesis. This ambitious work is tremendously peculiar, both epic and demotic, grand and chatty. ... The poem took him years to write and was certainly too much for him; he suffered a bad breakdown in 1932, after working through a draft. He called his illness “Rosi”, referring almost fondly to the “rosi” in “neurosis”. He broke down again, in a more acute attack, soon after the second world war.
"He had stayed in London through the blitz, deeply conscious of the ruination of the city. A quality of dreamscape now entered his work and he painted his most hauntingly mythical paintings, the most beautiful of which, "Aphrodite in Aulis", shows Aphrodite as the goddess and love object of all dying soldiers, German as well as British. Jones was writing a great deal of new poetry in wartime. The Anathemata, his longest, most complex and ambitious statement, was eventually published in 1952. One of the ideas that dominates the poem is of the interchangeability of serving armies: fighting men are always movable, and had been throughout history. The 10th Roman legion fought in Britain having been in situ at the crucifixion of Christ....
"Jones was in some ways ... a solitary figure. He camped out in hotel rooms. After the war he lodged in the house of a Harrow schoolmaster in Harrow-on-the-Hill, ending finally – and all too fittingly? – in Calvary Nursing Home. His inscriptions [word art] remind us, however, that far from being a recluse he was at the centre of a group of intensely loving and admiring friends: René Hague, Eric Gill’s son-in-law; the Catholic journalist and editor Tom Burns; Douglas Cleverdon, the influential BBC producer; Harman Grisewood, who more or less invented the Third Programme. A Catholic intellectual powerhouse.
"... Paul Hills and Ariane Bankes... have .... co-written a new David Jones biography....[It discusses] "The Animals of David Jones"....[a category which] brings out another fascinating aspect of Jones’s work...[:] the curled up and watchful domestic cats, the leopards, yaks and elephants with which the artist himself felt such a kinship. His view of animals was not a sentimental one, but serious. He saw dumb animals in mythic terms as ancient silent witnesses of “inward continuities” of site and history.
....."
Here is an example of his use of animal themes.
Yes, ' ancient silent witnesses of “inward continuities” of site and history.'
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