David Jones: Vision And Memory

Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant, Chichester, until Sunday, February 21

The Animals Of David Jones

Ditchling Museum Of Art And Craft, Lodge Lane, Ditchling, until Sunday, March 6

ANY artist longing for posterity should probably avoid specialising in watercolours.

For Ariane Bankes, curator of Vision And Memory, the first major retrospective of David Jones’s work since 1995, his expertise in watercolour is part of the reason he is not better known today.

“Watercolours are hugely difficult to display,” she says. “There are David Jones watercolours in every major gallery’s collections in the country, but they can’t show them as they are fragile and susceptible to daylight.”

Fortunately Jones was something of a polymath – creating drawings, oils, engravings, wood carving and even poetry in his long career.

The Pallant House exhibition spans from a drawing created when he was seven right up to artworks from his 70s.

Having served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers for two years during the First World War – an experience which was to scar him forever - he joined Eric Gill’s Guild Of St Joseph And St Dominic in Ditchling in the 1920s.

During this time he became engaged to Gill’s daughter Petra, and moved with the family when they relocated to Wales, learning how to create engravings under Gill’s tutelage.

Jones’s connections with Sussex didn’t end there – moving to a house in Portslade later in life.

The Pallant House exhibition runs concurrently with an career-spanning exhibition of Jones’s animal-inspired works at Ditchling Museum.

Bankes and co-curator Paul Hills have arranged the Pallant House display chronologically, bringing together between 85 and 95 works of art, some of which have never been displayed in public before.

“Luckily chronology and theme overlap,” says Bankes. “We are able to follow his themes through chronologically as he moved from one concern to another.

“You can see how he developed and moved from one media to another with incredible skill and dexterity.”

Even Jones’s skills as a poet – which saw him published by TS Eliot and praised by WH Auden – find a place in the exhibition in the form of quotes on the gallery walls.

“His later Inscriptions are to do with words,” says Bankes. “It was the way he saw the word as image and how he played with words.”

War and its impact is given its own special space. It was while writing his epic poem In Parenthesis about his wartime experience that Jones had his first nervous breakdown.

“He was so successful in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Bankes.

“He was part of the Seven And Five Society alongside characters like Barbara Hepworth and Ivon Hitchens. He was selling paintings to both public and private collections, making a good living until his breakdown.”

A lot of Jones’s greatest watercolours were created while he was living in Portslade.

“He had a small house on the beach overlooking the sea,” says Bankes. “He painted the same point of view over and over again in different weathers and lights. They don’t replicate very well – they are so translucent and delicate – you have to see them on the wall to appreciate their quality.”

Bankes first came across Jones’s work in Kettles Yard in Cambridge, gradually becoming more interested in both the man and his work. Her co-curator Hills could go one better – he actually befriended the artist towards the end of his life while living in Cambridge.

“Paul met him while he was a young man and they became fast friends,” says Bankes, adding that after Jones died in 1974 Hills was approached to curate a 1981 retrospective exhibition.

“Jones’s sensibility certainly filters through the exhibition. Paul can remember his preferences and the paintings he was most proud of. We did consider using yellow on the gallery walls, and Paul said David never liked the colour yellow.”

The pair have penned a book to accompany their exhibition.

The continuing influence of Jones’s work can be seen in an accompanying installation by writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal who is creating a special vitrine If We Attend inspired by Jones’s poetry – in particular his 1957 poem The Anathemata.

Pallant House: Open Tues to Sat 10am to 5pm, Sun 11am to 5pm, Thurs to 8pm, from £9/£5.50. Call 01243 774557.

Ditchling Museum: Open Tues to Sat 11am to 5pm, Sun noon to 5pm, from £6.50/£5.50. Call 01273 844744.