David Jones at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff

The David Jones exhibition currently on display at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff focuses on his graphic work rather than his better known paintings. Here we have woodblock prints and etchings, book illustrations and personally produced Christmas Cards, and his later inscriptions, with combined his love of the word and the drawn line. These works encompass two periods of his work. The formative years of the 20s, and the mature ones of the 50s and 60s. Jones’ art underwent a series of major shifts during his lifetime as he exhausted or abandoned one particular technique and searched for, discovered and learned another. He was a restless soul, never settling for long in any one place, and often residing in the houses of friends or family, or in retreats such as the Benedictine Monastery on Caldey Island off Pembrokeshire Coast of Wales, rather than setting up his own home. Art was, for him, a holy calling, and one which he pursued with solitary and ascetic single-mindedness, to the exclusion of other concerns or pleasures. His fragile health and a succession of nervous breakdowns arising from a sensitive, self-questioning temperament also sometimes precipitated major shifts in his modes of artistic expression. Failing eyesight meant that he no longer possessed the firmly concentrated vision required for etching by the end of the 1920s, for example. From the 30s onwards, he concentrated more on his writing, writing his major, book length prose-poem In Parenthesis, which was published in 1937, and which addressed his war experiences, locating them withinin a wider spiritual and mythological framework. He also began to compose his great work of Blakean mythopoesy Anathemata, which draws together ancient matter from Britain and the Mediterranean to create a sense of deep history and cultural subsoil upon which the present is overlaid. His experiences in the First World War trenches of the western front, where he was stationed with the Royal Welch Fusiliers from 1915-18 also contributed to subsequent ill-health, both physical and mental. But whilst the form of his art may have undergone various and significant changes, its content and purpose remained constant. It was an expression of Jones’ universal sense of the sacred, of the echoes of ancestry in the present, and of the vibrant, complex interconnectivity of all life, in all times.

Jones’ own ancestry was a mixture of Welsh, English and Italian. His father, James Jones, was Welsh, from Holywell in the North, and worked as a supervisor at a printers’ shop. His mother, Alice Bradshaw, was from Rotherhithe by the Thames, her father a mast and block maker, and her family dockside workers. David was born in Brockley, Kent in 1895, in the heart of the garden of England, and he would return there at various points in his life to live with his parents. This was far from the Welsh mountains which he would later claim as his spiritual homeland, but his father always instilled in him a sense of his essential Welshness, and he was familiar with the country from visits to see his grandfather and other relatives. The pull of these different claims of ancestry and birthright, of the English pastoral, the working man’s craft, the myth-soaked Welsh landscape and the Roman classical heritage fed into the teeming detail of Jones’ pencil and watercolour works. Their baroque weave of detail, created with a pencil line whose traceries can be followed beneath the translucent coloured surface as if refracted through a still surface of water, gives the sense of planes of historical, geological and mythological time intersecting and combining. After the war, Jones found a specific vessel for his sense of the numinous quality of the world in Catholicism, a marked break from the low church sensibilities his father had brought with him from Wales. In this respect, he sided with his mother’s ancestors, with the church of Rome. His decision to convert to Catholicism may have been influenced by the visit he made in early 1921 to the artistic and religious community set up on Ditchling Common in Sussex by Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler in 1913. By the end of the year, Jones had gone to live there, and became a sort of surrogate son to Gill, now indisputably the charismatic leader of the community. Gill had three daughters, but not the male heir which his traditionally paternalistic outlook led him to desire. Jones, looking for direction in his artistic and personal life, was the ideal person for Gill to take in and to whom he could impart his own ideals and beliefs. Ditchling offered a retreat from the world, and a supportive environment for a young man still dazed by the battery of war. Its daily routine was dedicated to artistic work, craftsmanship and religious devotions. There was also an attempt to attain a degree of self-sufficiency, with animals reared and crops grown. Gill and Pepler had both been inducted into the Tertiary Order of St Dominic, as lay members rather than friars or monks, still able to live and go about their business in the world. Jones followed suit in 1923. He was obviously, as were so many, in thrall to Gill’s commanding presence and forthright, frequently expressed views.

Gill revered the old crafts, and was firmly set against the appurtenances of technological modernity – cars, radios, telephones, grammaphone players and the like. He turned his back on the modern world to a large extent, and preached Dominican values of asceticism, discipline and hard work (the extent to which he practiced them is another matter). All of this appealed to Jones, whose sense of a present time rooted in and infused with ancient history and populated by mythological archetypes was attuned to the spirit of Ditchling, set aside from the speeding course of the contemporary world and its streamlined rush into futurity. Gill encouraged him to put aside the drawing and painting he’d been doing at the Westminster School of Art and take up a craft. In learning new technical skills he would cast off habitual gestures and develop a new vision, along with a new means of artistic expression. Jones tried carpentry, but discovered that he really had no talent for it whatsoever. So he took up wood engraving instead, which turned out to be far better suited to his artistic temperament. He was commissioned by Harold Munro of the Poetry Bookshop in London to illustrate one of two alphabet books for children written by Eleanor Farjeon, The Town Child’s Alphabet, which was published in 1924, and all the original plates for which are on display. Jones’ illustrations acted as a farewell to the city (which is clearly London), and he depicted it as a friendly place, full of characters who would cheerfully stop and give you the time of the day or point you in the right direction. He creates a magical, Mary Poppins London out of choking smog and hard labour, a utopian ideal of town or city life which reminds me a little of the 60s world Mary, Mungo and Midge. It’s a world which seems even more fantastic from a 21st century perspective, with its drayhorses, coalmen, lamplighters, one-man band ‘jazzmen’, and trolleybus drivers. The outlines of Jones’ people and the settings in which they work are bold and clearly drawn and the illustrations bright and uncluttered. With their spare caramel brown and chalky blue colouring on the white page, they look designs for ceramic plates or bowls, akin to those Eric Ravilious produced for Wedgwood in the 30s. They offer an appropriately optimistic and cheerful view of the modern world, parcelled up and neatly compartmentalised for children to enjoy. Their evident comfort with modernity is at odds with Gill’s rejection city life. I particularly like the T is for train driver illustration, which depicts a tube train emerging from a tunnel, a study in arches and curved perspectives which perfectly captures the excitement of the underground world through a child’s eyes.

The community at Ditchling broke up in 1924. Gill fell out with his co-founder Hilary Pepler, largely over financial affairs. He’d also attracted a great deal of attention by this time, with many writers, journalists and artists coming to hear his readily dispensed wisdom and firmly held and asserted philosophies, and to witness his ideal of the sacred creative life in action. He evidently enjoyed his growing status as an anti-modern guru, but eventually decided it had gone too far, and was impeding his work. He took his extended family (his own and two others) and headed for the remote country of the Black Mountains in Wales, settling in a crumbling old Benedictine monastery at Capel-y-ffin. Jones went with them. He was almost a part of the Gill family now. He had become engaged to Gill’s daughter Petra, a betrothal which Gill’s biographer Fiona McCarthy suggests might have expressed a seigneurial right of filial bestowal on the father’s part – an arranged marriage, in effect. There had been a dark cultish aspect to the commune at Ditchling, with Gill’s views and influence increasingly dominant over his family and other residents. The remoteness of Capel, and the gothic atmosphere of the monastery seemed to make this more pronounced, although Gill himself frequently escaped to other parts, and at this time found other outlets for his prodigious sexual appetites. Gill was a paternalistic head of the ‘family’, whether it was his own or the wider one of the community at large, and the offering of Petra to Jones was a way of drawing him in and sealing the bond of kinship. Iain Sinclair tries to evoke some of the atmosphere of the approach to Capel-y-ffin in Landor’s Tower, his exploration of the cultural and historical matter of the Black Mountains, the land of his own ancestry. He imagines Jones’ state of mind, and clearly feels a degree of affinity with the artist and his sense of uneasy connection with this dark landscape. Gill and his entourage turn up at the Welsh country station of Pandy like ‘Russian folk, a travelling circus’, animals straggling alongside. ‘David was the only one standing still’, Sinclair writes, ‘trying to understand, the where and the why, the how of this potentially fatal decision: the flight into Ewyas’. Driving along rough country roads in the back of a lorry towards the old monastery, ‘headlights caught the glittering eyes of a sheep trapped between hedges, they slowed to a walking pace as the panicked animal skittered uselessly from verge to verge…the countryside was strange and dark and deep, not a farmhouse light to be seen; late in the year, their move seemed more than ever a banishment, a mad flight from the duties and complexities of civilisation, a wilful descent into paganism and perversity’.

Hill Pastures - 1926

Petra eventually called off the engagement. As Sinclair puts it, she ‘reclaimed a stolen virginity and Jones was excluded from the garden he was struggling to design’. This is a reference to the shocking revelations in Fiona McCarthy’s biography, arrived at through a decoding of Gill’s copious diary entries, that he had had incestuous relations not only with his sisters but probably with his daughters too. Petra’s rejection (also a rejection of her father’s authority) led Jones to leave Capel for the monastic retreat of Caldy Island (although the would later be best man at her marriage to a man of her own choice in 1928). Jones’ view of women, in his art and by and large in his life too, was from hereon a distanced and idealised one, quite the opposite of Gill’s obsessively priapic perspective. There are many Goddesses in his paintings, whether they be in the form of the Virgin, Aphrodite, Persephone or Iphigenia. Sometimes these impressive, coolly impassive figures are literally placed on precarious pedestals, the other elements of the picture gathering around them as if to pay obeisance. The one genuinely sensual, eroticised portrait which Jones painted, a Female Nude in watercolour and pencil from 1929, was withheld from exhibition during his lifetime, implying an implicit disapproval. His view of women was akin to his approach to his art – chastely reverential and filled with a sense of sacred purpose.

The Book of Jonah - 1926

The parting with Petra marked a breaking away from Gill’s influence, too, and his mentor left a deep and lasting impression. The very fact that he’d brought him to Wales, into the wild heart of its harshly beautiful landscape, reconnected Jones with his spiritual home. This can be seen in his 1926 painting The Lancers (or Ponies on a Welsh Hill Slope), the copper engraving of which is to be found in the exhibition. The round curves of the two ponies’ flanks, bellies and necks finds formal echo in the contours of the mountainous hills beyond, which as a result seem to have a breathing life of their own. Jones displays an instinctive, deeply felt sense of the living contours of the landscape. The time spent in Wales seems to have unleashed Jones’ creative impulses, tapping into some deeply bored well of inspiration, and the period of the mid to late 20s was a particularly productive one. Examples from two series of wood engravings are included in the exhibition. The Book of Jonah (1926) and The Chester Play of the Deluge (1927) are both very dark, as befits the subject matter, with large areas of the woodblock left to impress expanses of black ink, carved figures emerging as fragile, skeletal white outlines from the murk. The leviathan in Jonah is particularly effective, a black void set against the differentially rayed lines of waves, sunbeams, hazy sky and rain, the negative twin of Melville’s white whale Moby Dick. The oceanic scenery of both draws on his time looking out of the window of his cell on Caldy Island, ‘trying to iron out the sea’, as Iain Sinclair puts it.

The Chester Play of the Deluge (1926) - The Dove

The Dove, from the Deluge, is masterful in its simple contrast of boldly outlined forms. The waters fill most of the frame, with swollen, blocklike clouds hanging heavily like boulders in the narrow strip of sky at the top. In the foreground, the jaggedly cruciform branches of the olive tree, from which the descending dove is plucking a branch, reach up from the waves like a figure finally breaking the surface after a deep and lengthy plunge and taking a huge, life-giving gasp of air. It’s outlined with a blurred white halo, making it stand out softly from the sea with a spectral shimmer, a symbol of radiant newness. The submerged height of the mountain can be seen beneath the recumbent moon shape of the ark, and is suggestive of great depths. Its angled shadow is reflected by the rays of sunlight fanning out from beneath the sea’s horizon. The small, irregular oval of lapping water marking the emergence of the mountain’s peak upon which the ark perches could almost be the distended disc of the rising sun, visible through a world made momentarily translucent. The carved wooden block from which what is generally considered to be one of Jones’ finest prints was taken is also present here, giving an insight into the craft techniques used to create the final image.

Nativity with Beast and Shepherds (1927) - Christmas Card

The Lancers, his picture of two Welsh hill ponies, had shown Jones’ affinity with animals. This is further seen in other works in the exhibition, including the picture Reclining Cat, which captures his favoured domestic creature at languorous ease. One of the first extant drawings from his childhood is a depiction of a bear, dating from around the turn of the century when he was 8. A sketch of a comical camel (is there any other kind?) from a book of observational drawings made at London Zoo is included here. These were studies which were helpful in creating the menagerie crowding onto the ark in his Deluge woodcuts. There are also a couple of Christmas cards which he designed to send to friends, Animals Kneeling (1927) and Beasts Rejoicing (1929), both displaying a keen eye for individual character in the non-human. They are notable for their avoidance of the strong temptation towards anthropomorphosis to which many artists succumb when using animals as subject matter. Jones had great compassion for animals, viewing life as sacred in whatever form it took. His pencil and watercolour paintings are also wound about and garlanded by profuse growths of flowers, vines and undergrowth which almost seem to be further extending buds, tips and tendrils as you look. He may have been a Catholic, but there is a definite Pagan cast to his art, in keeping with his keen sense of connection with his Welsh and Roman roots.

In Parenthesis frontspiece - 1937

Jones was also interested in animals on a symbolic level, and in particular in the Biblical ritual figure and subsequent metaphorical notion of the scapegoat. What has now largely become a figure of speech derives from a Jewish ritual which was enacted (and may still be) on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Two goats would be brought into the Temple. One would be offered up to God as a sacrifice, the other would bear the transferred sins of the Israeli people and be exiled into the desert wastelands beyond the city walls. Here, Azazel, the lord of the wilderness (an aspect of the Devil who would tempt Christ when he entered his terrain) receives it. Christ would become a metaphorical scapegoat, a divine bearer of the sins of all mankind rather than those of a particular tribe. The term has since implied and element of martyrdom, whether selflessly entered into or imposed. The front and endpiece illustrations David Jones produced for his First World War prose poem In Parenthesis use the scapegoat as a metaphor for the sacrifice of soldiers in the trenches. In the frontspiece, a tin-hatted, semi-naked soldier is caught in a tangle of barbed wire and netting but remains standing in statuesque pose. His arms are stiff and partially outstretched (although not so fully as to blatantly emulate the crucifixion) as if he has been hung on an upright pole as a grisly, tattered scarecrow. Rats run around his feet and he is set up within a blasted landscape of war resembling the wasteland depicted by Paul Nash in We Are Building A New World. It’s an oddly stripped-down, modernist landscape, all forms simplified to their skeletal essentials. The soldier’s face is blank and without emotion or pain, his eyes empty and devoid of pupil or iris. He’s a carved representation rather than a real figure of flesh and blood. In the endpiece, his place is taken by a real scapegoat, its hooves tangled up in the barbed wire like the goat found in a thorny thicket by Abraham, a ready replacement for his son Isaac as an offering to God. The spear piercing its side makes clear the holy nature of its sacrifice. The dying beast looks upwards to the clear night sky, in which a sickle moon and large, ‘naïve’ pointed stars (something of a Jones signature) glow. A beam from the brightest of these stars shafts down to pierce the creature’s eye, connecting it to he heavens just as the shaft of the spear connects it to the earth. In the wasteland of the western front, it is caught in a limbo between two worlds. On the wall of his room in the rest home in Harrow where he spent many of his later years, restricted by declining health, Jones pinned a picture of Laika, the space-faring Russian dog, who was a kind of modern, rocket-age incarnation of this ancient archetype.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner plate 3 - The Death Fires

The symbolism of the sacrificial scapegoat also informed Jones’ illustrations for Coleridge’s fantastical narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He provided 8 plates to illustrate this at the behest of Douglas Cleverdon, who ran a literary press in Bristol, working on them at the same time as he was composing In Parenthesis. They were published in 1929. Jones was just learning the craft of copper plate engraving at the time, and the illustrations, which use this technique, were thus of necessity as much as design lacking in formal complexity or intricate detail. They have a certain naïve, comic book quality which serves them well. There was certainly no attempt to emulate the richly textured light and shade of Gustave Dore’s renowned lithographic illustrations. Basic outlined figures with notional, simplified features lend the plates the flattened look of murals, with spare use of shading giving the impression of shape and depths to ocean waves, or of the haze of an unearthly supernatural heat. The exaggerated and simplified form of Jones’ characters lends them the appearance of Classical figures on vases or friezes, and also brings to mind Jean Cocteau’s personalised interpretation of those same influences. In drawing on ancient models, Jones’ illustrations take on a peculiarly modern appearance, fully in keeping with the artistic trends of the time. Perhaps this was not so surprising. He had, after all, been accepted into the very modern artistic community of The Seven and Five Society in 1928, taking his place alongside his friend Ben Nicholson (who had recommended him) and others such as Winifred Nicholson, John Piper, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Jones’ Mariner, transfixed to the mast or hung from the rigging, is very much the scapegoat figure, and ancient, nautically bearded version of the soldier in the barbed wire thicket, with the same shrugging, spread-armed pose and downward, blank-eyed gaze. Several preparatory stages of plate 3, The Death Fires, are displayed in the exhibition, allowing us to see the build-up of detail in the composition. Beginning with the central element of the boat, the cluster of imploring crewmen are added on deck, then sun, moon and stars, and their surrounding shaded haze of sickly shimmer. Then there are Coleridge’s ‘water snakes’, creatures of uncharted oceans which Jones depicts as sinuous, many-legged and oddly benevolent looking monsters (in the poem, their appearance presages the dropping of the albatross from around the Mariner’s neck). They are aquatic arthropods, segmented insects of the deep rather than fearsome leviathans. A proof for a copper engraving displayed alongside the Rime illustrations remains as a tantalising hint of an unrealised project. Wounded Knight features another of Jones’ Goddesses, in this case the Celtic Arianrhod. She cradles the head of a dying knight, perhaps Arthur himself, in some otherworld, whilst horses dance on land and ocean wave in the background. Jones was to have illustrated La Morte D’Arthur for Cleverdon as a follow up to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It would have been a project perfectly suited to his abiding artistic, cultural and spiritual concerns. But failing eyesight and health meant that he was unable to devote the concentrated vision required for the copper engraving process on such an involved piece of work. This is a great shame, as it could almost have been the book he was destined to illustrate.

There is a quite a temporal leap from the Coleridge illustrations and the Wounded Knight to the final works on display in the exhibition, Jones having been preoccupied with the writing of The Anathemata and with his pencil and watercolour paintings. These works from the 50s and 60s are some of his inscriptions, deeply personal painted texts, carefully chosen or pieced together for their particular meaning to Jones, which were created either for his own pleasure or as gifts to be presented to close friends. Generally written in Latin with fragments of other languages folded in, and inked or watercoloured over a painted background of Chinese White, which gives it the antique look of fine, time-faded parchment, these treat the word itself as sacramental, a worthy visual subject in itself. They display a delight in the shape of letters and their contrast with and connection to their neighbours in words and sentences which bears comparison with Islamic decorative calligraphy. The inscriptions also draw together the twin strands of the literary and the visual in Jones’ art. The shadow of Gill, in the form of his stone-carved lettering, also falls upon these works. But whereas Gill was concerned in his carving to produce scripts which obliterated the personality of the creator, Jones’ words are far more individually expressive, with no intention of producing a uniform and utilitarian font. His letters curl and bulge, stand on elegant feet or end in viny curlicues, or are finished off with exuberant flourishes. Words vary in size, and sometimes grow or shrink along the line, which frequently wavers from strict rigidity. Particular words and sentences are given their own muted colours – purples, yellows, greens and blues – which gives them a distinctive character of their own, as if they had a synaesthetic as well as linguistic association. They have the feeling of life, as if they were breathing and pulsing, the word an integral part of the teeming world in which it is rooted and whose beauty and meaning it expresses. Included here are Cora Lucia, written for TS Eliot in 1953 and incorporating elements of his work; What Says His Mabinogi from 1958, which juxtaposes Latin and Welsh words (Jones’ mixed heritage finding lexicographical form) and takes its text from his own Anathemata poem; and Mulier Cantat from 1960, which combines Latin and English, setting Biblical texts about the Virgin and the Incarnation alongside quotes from James Joyce. Having begun his inscriptions in the 1940s, he produced his last in 1968 for the poet, essayist and critic Kathleen Raine. It is appropriate that Raine had written much about William Blake, and was a well known expert on the painter, poet and printer. Like Jones, Blake had brought the word to vibrant life on the printed page, making of it a thing of visual beauty and semi-organic form. Jones can be seen as part of a lineage of visionary British artists which runs through Blake (its prime progenitor) and on into the 20th century. An artistic ancestry which both expresses its own time but also seeks, and sometimes almost succeeds, to transcend it and capture a glimpse of the eternal. Time is a factor if you want to see the David Jones exhibition at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, however, as it’s only on until 15th July.

Art Holiday - Part Two

Kettles Yard in Cambridge is a small gallery and house just outside the centre of the city. The house was knocked together from three old cottages, with a further extension added later, by the art collector and former curator of the Tate Jim Ede. He lived here with his wife Helen from 1958 to 1973. His art collection hung upon the walls, part of the usual furnishings and objects of daily life. The house was opened as a gallery whilst they still lived there and remained as it was after they had moved out. It offers a unique opportunity to view works of 20th century art in a sympathetic domestic setting. The abstract works, in particular, seem to really gain from being juxtaposed against the domestic objects and ornaments, which are in themselves often things of beauty. The spiral of pebbles on the circular wooden table, graded according to a chiaroscuro scale of grey, have been adopted as a kind of house logo. The adjoining purpose built gallery shows temporary exhibitions, some retrospective and some by contemporary artists, as well as hosting concerts of chamber music and jazz.


We’ve been here on many occasions, but this time the current exhibition followed through on its promise to turn things ‘Upside Down/Inside Out’. The house where Ede’s collection normally hangs was given over to ‘interventions’ by artists who had exhibited over the past 14 years, thus giving it something of a ‘best of’ flavour. This idea was particularly effective if you were familiar with the usual arrangement of the contents of the house, as these changes disrupted the experience to which you’d grown accustomed, making you look afresh at objects and spaces which you may otherwise have ignored through casual recognition. The house is well known for the way the light pours in and plays over its objects and furnishings throughout the day. Kathryn Faulkner makes use of this by creating images on photographic paper imprinted by the spectral shadows thrown by sunlight through various glass objects. Literal impressions of light. Judith Goddard put up a fixed door of transparent Perspex barring entrance to Helen Ede’s old bedroom, and set up a security camera inside to sweep it eye across the enclosed space. The slowly moving image could be watched on a tv screen set up on a chest of drawers. Its clinical digital picture seemed both somehow more sharply real and less present than the actual space it reproduced. You half expected to see a digital HD spectre walk across the screen, reluctantly reconfigured from the past and reduced to a diminished virtual existence; a gigabyte ghost. It reminded me of Gwen John’s Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, with its empty chair by an open window, and I found its similar record of absence extremely moving.

The table where the radio sat

My favourite piece was probably David Sheppard’s interactive sound art object, a re-tooled old wooden radio from the pre-transistor age. This allowed you to create your own live mix of music by manipulating the three control knobs for band, volume and tuning, which gave access to different sounds, rhythms and pitch variations. Both Stockhausen and John Cage had incorporated the spontaneous sounds of tuned radios into their music, so this was perhaps a nod to their memory. In any case, it was great DIY avant-garde composition fun.


The walls of Kettles Yard are painted white, the better to reflect the shifting shadows cast as the sun measures out the hours of the day. Michael Craig-Martin’s painting of one alcove room in a violent shade of magenta was thus particularly startling, and difficult to ignore. He had removed all the furniture whilst he redecorated, replacing it all again in exactly the same place, save for one chair, which he painted in relief outline on the wall. His intervention was perversely effective for being so wholly out of character with the rest of the house, and for being hidden in a well chosen nook which meant that you came across it unexpectedly.


Along the lengthy gallery of the extension, Douglas Allsop had strung his ‘Blind Screen’, fashioned from lengths of video tape. These shimmered gently in the breeze, which I admit was caused by my blowing on them. The use of what is now an all but redundant recording medium as the material for this installation could have been just another piece of weakly punning conceptual art, but its shiny, shimmering and inherently fragile surfaces made it visually appealing in itself. The mystery of what further images were locked into its magnetic depths merely added to its allure. Just opposite, Mary Lemley had set up a small monitor atop an empty glass-fronted cabinet, which slowly reeled through photographs of every object in her house. This was interesting enough for a while, particularly in the juxtapositions it threw up between, say, an art book and a more practical item such as a mug. It did seem a bit redolent of the ‘let’s look at me’ art of recent times which reflects or perhaps just seeks to be a part of the modern malaise of celebritocracy.

David Jones, Vexilla Regis (1947-8)

The converse side of this disruption of the normal display in the house was the use of the gallery for pictures which had been displaced, alongside further works not normally on show. This was a good opportunity to see these displayed in a more conventional gallery space, and grouped together by artist. There were several prints and etchings by David Jones, including his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was interesting to mentally compare with those of Mervyn Peake and Gustav Dore. Also on display was his Vexilla Regis from 1947, one of my favourite Kettles Yard paintings. This is a complex interweaving of Roman and Celtic landscapes with a plethora of pagan Christian symbolism. There are Roman temples and what looks like a statue of Diana in a woodland grove alongside a stone circle and a Glastonbury-like mount. The three trees in the foreground, one topped with a Roman legionary eagle, are the trees of Calvary, the foremost of which has flowered into a riot of life at its crown. It is a wonderful picture which really needs to be seen close up to appreciate its dense detail. You can imagine Jones himself, his eyesight failing, leaning close to the surface of the paper to create these thickets of tangled symbolism. It was probably actually better seeing it in this context than in its usual position in the house, where the confined space and domestic furnishings militate against a closer and more detailed inspection.

Elizabeth Vellacott, Bare Trees and Hills (1960) in the house

Winifred Nicholson, Primula and Cyclamen (1923)

Jones worked at least partly in pencil, and there were also several beautiful works in pencil by Elizabeth Vellacott, whose depiction of trees is particularly fine. She somehow manages to convey the mysterious haze which hangs silently over some afternoons. The musical equivalent would by Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, in whose particulate layers of drift you can almost synaesthetically see the dancing motes of dust in beams of sunlight. Winifred Nicholson was represented by one of her many flower paintings and by a seascape of paradoxical solidity. The flower paintings always seem to convey the idea of some kind of threshold. The flowers on the windowsill and the landscape beyond suggest a boundary between inner and outer worlds, of ordered experience and unmediated nature. The flowers themselves, contained in vases, bottles or jugs, positioned on this threshold, are somewhere in between. Their subtly variegated colours could act as a symbol of the act of vision with which we perceive and interpret the world, and of the inner eye through which the artist seeks to transform it in order to express some underlying essence. Nicholson would, in later life, experiment with the use of prisms on the windowsill in order to split light into its spectrum, cracking it open to reveal and examine its contents.

Ben Nicholson, Christmas Night (1930)

Ben Nicholson, at one time married to Winifred and later to sculptor Barbara Hepworth, is represented by abstract work which is more in line with European and Russian currents of modernism and constructivism. But there is also an earlier work from 1930, a domestic interior of his bedroom at night. Painted at a time when his life was in a state of transition, having left Winifred and his children, it has a rather melancholy feel of loneliness. His monogrammed brush set takes on a monumental presence in the emptiness of the room, his occupation of what would traditionally have been considered a primarily female space serving to emphasise his solitude. Outside, the church is swallowed by the darkness, and a horse (or a donkey?) looks longingly in at the light of the domestic interior from which it is excluded. The viewer’s perspective is from the interior of the room, but the curtain is drawn back to frame a wide expanse of the winter night. The depths of this cold darkness threaten to engulf the fragile comforts of the home.

Christopher Wood, Building the Boat, Treboul, 1930

Another Kettles Yard artist featured in the gallery, a friend of both the Edes and the Nicholsons, was Christopher Wood. His Building the Boat, Treboul from 1930 is very familiar from its customary position in the house, and was one of many pictures painted during his stay on the Breton coast. The half-built boat resembles the beached skeletal ribcage of a beached whale, the woman in the foreground sadly cradling a plank of wood as if she is carrying away a relic. The painting seems haunted by death, although this maybe a judgement influenced by the knowledge of Wood’s own tragic passing shortly thereafter.

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat (1926)

Wood was born in Liverpool, but took the traditional artist’s passage over the channel to France, and it was here that he established himself in the fevered atmosphere of the golden age, the ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 20s. The portrait ‘Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat’ is of one of the young men in Jean Cocteau’s circle. Wood himself shared a studio with Cocteau in 1924/5, and it was through him that he met Jean and Jeanne Bourgoint, a brother and sister with a very close bond. They were to become the models for the central characters of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, later filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Wood’s full length portrait depicts Jean as frankly sensuous, with his relaxed, crossed-ankle posture, red lips and blue-eyed gaze. This sensuality is further reflected in the Persian cat which he strokes, and which shares his blue eyes. The cats claws are spread out and digging into his leg, however. Maybe Wood is alluding to a vicious and parasitical side to his charms, of which he is all-too conscious. He is like the cat in that he expects to be taken in, fed and loved but feels under no obligation to give anything in return. There may even be an element of jealousy here, Wood digging in his own catty claw. The rumours amongst Cocteau’s gossipy hangers-on were that he was now favouring Jean over Wood. The visible fragments of sketches in the background of the painting suggest that Wood abandoned it before applying the finishing touches, perhaps tiring of the subject and of the Parisian demi-monde in general. What remains, however, is the perfect portrait of the gilded and offhandedly destructive youth of the period. Sadly, it was during this period that Wood, and Jean’s sister Jeanne, picked up and addiction to Cocteau’s drug of choice, opium (and Cocteau has, fairly or unfairly, been accused of wrecking a succession of lives at this time). Neither was able to shake their addiction, and both ended up committing suicide, Wood beneath the wheels of a train at Salisbury station.

Alfred Wallis, Boats Before a Great Bridge (c.1935-7)

When living in St Ives, Wood became friends with the ‘naïve’ artist Alfred Wallis, moving into a house a few doors away from him. Many of Wallis’ paintings, confined by the space of the scraps of card or packing-case wood which he used as canvasses, can be found in the upper gallery of the house extension, and several made it into the gallery exhibition too. Wallis intuitively reached some of the same compositional distortions of perspective which modern artists were adopting, the flattening out into clearly separated blocks and shapes of colour, perhaps making a virtue out of technical limitations. Both Wood and Ben Nicholson, and through them others, took inspiration from him and his untutored and thus, to them, somehow purer eye. Wallis made the break with tradition that they were seeking by virtue of being unencumbered by knowledge of it. The fact that he was a retired man (an ex-fisherman) who painted out of personal need rather than with a commercial imperative made him all the more appealing.

Jim Ede at Kettles Yard

Wallis is now seen as an important, if eccentric, English (Cornish, if you prefer) artist, largely, but not solely, for his influence on others. It is interesting to speculate as to how others like him have existed in parallel with the recognised figures of art history, their work lacking the patronage of well-placed artists which Wallis’ received and destined for the bonfire after their deaths. There is something very satisfying about seeing these vivid paintings on their scraps of discarded packaging hanging on the whitewashed walls of a modern gallery. No conceptual commentary behind the use of material, it was just what lay to hand. They are so very far from a small Cornish fishing village at the corner of the country, and also from the commodified ArtWorld ™ which often seems to exist largely to reflect upon itself and its market processes. The exhibition, and Kettles Yard in general, serve to remind us of some great British artists, but also that they didn’t exist in isolation. Their work may have been distinctively British, but it was also fully aware of and had strong links with the European movements. This is no little Englander art. Ultimately this is a place which retains the atmosphere of a home, and as such is a tribute to the openness and generosity of Jim and Helen Ede, who did so much to accommodate and encourage the artists who were also often their friends.