Jones, David (1895-1974)

English artist and writer. His lettering, together with his paintings and wood engravings, are inimitable and immediately recognizable. In 1937 he published the war novel In Parenthesis, a recreation of Albion in the trenches, derived from personal experience and his cockney and Welsh background. He also produced volumes of poetry at intervals, including The Anathemata 1952 and The Sleeping Lord 1974.

A Roman Catholic convert, Jones was concerned always to find valid signs for the present: his themes are taken from Welsh tradition and the Roman imperial past, and the form of his poetry is as experimental as his meaning is Christian and complex.

He was born in Brockley, Kent, the son of a Welsh foreman printer. He trained as an artist with the Camberwell and Westminster schools and later stayed with Eric Gill at Capel-y-Ffin where he produced his first memorable paintings. Thereafter he developed his Impressionist heritage to express his Celtic interests, literary and mythological. His book Epoch and Artist 1959 reasserts the function of art as the servant of religion.