Wales's visual laureate from London

THE centenary of David Jones's birth fell last November 1st, and has been honoured by a travelling exhibition (still running) at Swansea, Hove and Cardiff. This might indicate that Wales now regards him as a kind of visual national laureate even though he was London born and never lost his cockney accent.

Jones was acutely conscious of his Welshness, both racial and cultural, yet he never mastered the language of his ancestors properly. He was, however, immersed in Welsh mythology and had a special feeling for the Arthurian cycle the historical Arthur, after all, was a Welshman, or at least a Romanised Briton.

Jones was that rare phenomenon, a painter writer. He has certain predecessors in British art notably Rossetti and Blake, and more recently Wyndham Lewis, who is now little read and no longer looks a major artist, or even a very good one. Plenty of painters have written books, including Jack Yeats, Sickert, Gauguin, Patrick Heron to mention a few, but though they wrote well it is not by their books that they are remembered. Jones would have been remembered by his writings - especially the novel In Parenthesis even if he had never painted or drawn a line.

This poetic realistic, slightly Joycean novel got its name because Jones, in retrospect regarded his service at the Western Front in 1914-18 as being a kind of interlude or interruption in his life, a period within brackets as it were. Yet it marked him for life, as it did Robert Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Henry Williamson and the various British writers who went through the Great War and lived to think, tell and write about it. Jones's fellow painter, Stanley Spencer, suffered a nervous collapse through his war experiences in Macedonia, though he went on to create perhaps the finest achievement of British first World War art, his murals in Burghclere Chapel.

Unlike many others, Jones did not "get it soft" by serving as some base line technician or supply line soldier. He saw real fighting through most of his service period, or else was subject to the long drawn hell of shelling and the passive misery of the soggy, stinking trenches in 1916 he fought in the Somme offensive, suffering a leg wound in the battle of Mametz Wood, and in February 1918 he was shipped back to England suffering from "severe trench fever". Instead of malingering, as so many men did in his place, he was anxious to get back to the front and was honourably demobilised in December of that year.

IT EVEN seems that Jones, who hated war and slaughter, liked getting back to his regiment, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and to the atmosphere of camaraderie and malefellowship in the face of common danger and frequent mishandling by the brass hats. In part this was probably a desire to get away from his domineering, socially ambitious mother, who dominated him after the death from TB of her elder son, Harold. His father, a printer overseer from Flintshire, seems to have been a quiet, gentle man who sometimes sang Welsh songs to his children.

Growing up in Brockley, a London suburb, David Jones left school at 14 and studied at Camberwell School of Art, where one of his teachers was a painter named Hartrick who had worked in Paris in the 1890s and had known Gauguin and van Gogh. After the war he took up the threads of his career again and studied (grant aided) at Westminster School of Art, where he was occasionally lectured by Sickert. About this time he began to exhibit his work, but one of the turning points in his life was his meeting with the sculptor craftsman social prophet Eric Gill. It has often been said that Gill - an overpowering personality - was responsible for Jones's conversion to Roman Catholicism, but in fact he seems to have determined on this step before they met; and the priest who introduced them to one another, Father John O'Connor, was also the man who received him into the church.

His Nonconformist father was horrified by his turning to Rome, but Jones found in Gill a kind of substitute father and intellectual mentor. He lived in the quasi monastic communities which Gill formed around himself at Ditchling and later at Capel-y-ffin in Wales, and made almost comically abortive efforts to become a practical craftsman, though he did learn to carve in wood. He even was engaged for a time to Gill's daughter Petra, but the affair hung fire for some years and in the end she broke it off and married another man. The various portraits Jones painted of her are among the most haunting things in his output. Her final rejection was a blow which he felt deeply for a long time, but in the opinion of his friends he was unsuited to marriage, and all his life he had difficulty in keeping afloat financially. To support a wife and family would have been beyond him.

JONES never had a home or even a proper studio of his own; he lived on and off with the Gills, with his parents, with friends, and in the home of his formidable patron, Helen Sutherland. For some years he lived in a lodging house and his last years were spent in a single hired room where friends and admirers came to see him (including, in his last years, Stravinsky).

He effectively gave up painting in oils, and his black and white work virtually stopped when he finally realised that his true medium was watercolour, with a strong linear element added. These luminous, almost transparent works, full of nature and mythological elements, have a kind of spiritual radiance which makes them unique in British 20th century art. They give off a refulgence which goes far beyond their relatively small scale (25 by 20 inches is a fair average).

Though unworldly and unambitious, he was included in most avant garde exhibitions of the era in London, and for a time he was a member of the famous Seven and Five Society which also included Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson, Nicholson's first wife Winifred and his second wife, Barbara Hepworth. In the end Nicholson, who had originally brought him into the group, was largely responsible for pushing him out of it because he aimed to make it a spearhead for abstract art. Jones does not seem to have worried much, but for a time in the early 1930s he suffered from nervous depression - virtually a prolonged breakdown - which prevented him from painting. He was to have at least one recurrence of this nervous malady before his death, perhaps linked to his experiences in the Flanders trenches, but enhanced by a mood of isolation and by the feeling of being out of step.

The publication of In Parenthesis in 1937 was a landmark in his life, and in that same year works of his were shown in the Venice Biennale. Reviewers of this strange, utterly original novel phantasmagoria saw the influence of Joyce, but Jones was angered by this and claimed never to have read Ulysses (though he was greatly impressed when his friend Renc Hague read Anna Livia Plumbelle to him). He was too old for active service in the second World War, so he painted away steadily and found another field into which he put some of his most profound emotions and finest craftsmanship - lettering and inscriptions. After the war, his work began to travel abroad, while in 1949 David Jones was published in the Penguin Modern Painters series which was such a landmark in the postwar years. And in 1952 he finally published the long, rather Poundian poem, The Anathemata, which has always sharply divided critical opinion; Auden declared it a masterpiece, while others continue to find it unreadable.

JONES was deeply loved by a wide variety of men and women, but an in born psychological loneliness dogged him all his life; and though he had serious emotional relationships with at least three women, by choice or necessity he lived celibately until his death on October 28th, 1974. He was no prude, his writings and letters are full of soldiers' language and he even wrote bawdy limericks, but there was something of the medieval monk illuminator in his temperament.

Almost inevitably you are reminded, when looking at his work, of the Book of Kells and of the great glowing, intricate Bibles and Books of Hours of the Middle Ages. Though he failed to master either Welsh or Latin, he was an erudite and widely read man particularly the history of old Britain and in Welsh and classical mythology (one of the most remarkable passages of In Parenthesis unites the Welsh myth of the "Battle of the Trees" with the still twitching bodies of fellow soldiers hung on German barbed wire after an abortive offensive). The disparate essays he collected for his book Epoch and Artist show the range of his interests and his almost agonised awareness of the spiritual and intellectual crisis of his age.

He saw himself as battling against Modernist formalism, and generally he was rather hostile to abstract art; Jones's intellectual position might roughly be defined as Christian Humanist. Some of his roots lie in Preraphaelitism, but he was also well aware of contemporary French art, including Bonnard, Matisse and Dufy, though he only visited France once and then briefly. The dense, obsessively linear and detailed character of his late works have repelled some critics, though in fact their "all over" quality is strangely contemporary and there are signs of a new wave of interest in his work which proves that he was anything but backward looking. It may be that the 21st century will see David Jones and his significance more clearly than most of his own generation did.