David Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, of Welsh descent. He was a poet and novelist of some distinction as well as a painter. After military service in World War I he studied at Westminster School of Art in London. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1921, and throughout his life the symbols and liturgy of the church played an important part in his art. For a time he lived with Eric Gill and his family in Ditchling in Sussex and later in Wales; he was briefly engaged to be married to Gill's daughter, Petra. His novel In Parenthesis (1937), about his experiences of the war and his poetry on the same subject brought him into prominence in the 1930s, but he suffered a nervous breakdown, and was thereafter dogged by mental illness. In 1932 he painted Curtained Outlook and the theme of looking out of one view onto another recurs frequently in his work, often as an indirect symbol of looking out of one work into another. In such scenes he included many of his primary interests - landscape, flowers, birds and animals - all bound together in a delicate tracery of pencil or pen, and pale, transparent washes. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate Gallery, London in 1981.

Out of the Wood: British Woodcuts and Wood Engravings 1890 – 1945, The British Council 1991

Further reading:
Nicolette Grey, The Paintings of David Jones, Lund Humphries, London 1989

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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  • Art Project