David Jones | |
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David Jones
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Born | Walter David Michael Jones 1 November 1895 Brockley, Kent, England |
Died | 28 October 1974 Harrow, Middlesex, England |
(aged 78)
Occupation | Poet, Artist, Essayist, Critic |
Literary movement | Modernism |
Notable works | In Parenthesis (poem), Cara Wallia Derelicta (inscription) |
Notable awards | Order of the Companions of Honour |
Walter David Jones CH, CBE (known as David Jones, 1 November 1895 – 28 October 1974) was both a painter and one of the first-generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolour, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was considered by T. S. Eliot to be of major importance, and his The Anathemata was considered by W. H. Auden to be the best long poem written in English in the twentieth century. His Christian beliefs and Welsh heritage helped form his work.
Jones was born on 1 November 1895 in Arabin Road, Brockley, Kent, now a suburb of South East London, and later lived in nearby Howson Road. His father, James Jones, had been born in Flintshire in north Wales, to a Welsh-speaking family but was discouraged from speaking Welsh by his father, who, in common with many Welsh-speaking parents of the time, believed that habitual use of the language might hold his child back in his career. James Jones had moved to London to work as a printer's overseer for the Christian Herald Press, and it was here that he had met his wife, Alice, a Londoner born and bred. They had three children: Harold (who died at nineteen of tuberculosis), Alice, and David.
Jones exhibited artistic promise at an early age, even entering his drawings into exhibitions of children's artwork. He wrote that from the age of six he knew that he would devote his life to art. In 1909, at fourteen, he persuaded his parents to allow him to abandon traditional education for art school and entered the Camberwell Art School. There he studied under A.S. Hartrick, who had worked with Van Gogh and Gauguin, Reginald Savage and Herbert Cole, and who introduced him to the work of the Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites. At Camberwell it was mandatory to study English Literature, and in addition to his art studies Jones also developed his knowledge of literature.