David Jones is regarded as one of the most significant modernist writers of his generation.
He served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Frontline between 1915-1918 and his magnum opus, In Parenthesis - regarded by peers including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden as a masterpiece - is now recognised as one of the most important texts inspired by the First World War.
Jones, however, primarily regarded himself as an artist. Having studied at Camberwell Art School and the Westminster School of Art, he became an active participant in exhibition societies including the Seven and Five Group alongside the likes of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens and Frances Hodgkins.
Jones’s work is largely figurative in technique, and the chosen medium of watercolour a symbolic decision on the artist’s part, being fluid, mutable and evocative of a long English tradition, from contemporaries including Bawden through Blake and reaching back to medieval illuminations.
