Lot 48
£25,200
Auction: MODERN MADE Part I | 31 October 2024 | Lots 41 to 79
signed and dated in pencil (lower left), pencil and watercolour on paper
37cm x 52cm (14 ½in x 20 ½in)
The Redfern Gallery, London, 1950;
Private Collection, U.K.
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.
His works evoke a sense of gentle poetry and depth of meaning. Complex in their apparent simplicity, his oeuvre is perhaps best described in the artist’s own words from 1935:
“I should like to speak of a quality which I rather associate with the folk tales of Wales or Celtic derivation, a quality congenial and significant to me which in some oblique way has some connection with what I want to do in painting. I find it impossible to define, but it has to do with a certain affection for the intimate creatureliness of things – a care for, and appreciation of the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals, and yet withal a pervading sense of metamorphosis and mutability.”