SEASON’S GREETINGS!
David Jones, Christmas Card 1926, courtesy of Dominic Kemp in association with Austin/Desmond Fine ArtWe’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas, with this season’s-greetings card created by David Jones in December 1926, a very rare wood-engraving print, courtesy of Dominic Kemp in association with Austin/Desmond Fine Art. It is a proof of a card Jones was asked to design, but was never used.
The 1920s saw a status shift for wood engraving in the public consciousness, as it increasingly became considered an art form, rather than a mere reproductive craft. Jones was one of the artists in the vanguard of that movement.
If Jones had been a half-way decent carpenter, he might never have got involved in wood engraving. He turned to the medium after failing to achieve the level of carpentry skills required to pass his apprenticeship at Eric Gill’s Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, in Ditchling.
In 1923 Gill moved to Capel-y-Finn in Wales, and Jones soon followed him, becoming engaged to the artist’s daughter Petra in 1924. She was to break off the relationship in 1927, after which he moved back to England, initially to Brockley with his parents.
There followed the most productive period of his career, as he combined wood-engraving with drawing and painting (largely watercolour landscapes fashioned in a unique primitivist/naïve style). For some years he was a member of the Seven and Five Society, alongside the likes of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore). Ben Nicholson expelled him from the group in 1935, for refusing to fully embrace abstraction.
Jones had been on active service in WW1, spending a total of 114 weeks on the front line, being injured at the Somme and returning to fight in the notorious Battle of Passchendaele. He consequently suffered from shell shock (post-traumatic stress disorder) which affected him for the rest of his life. Between 1928 and 1938 he wrote the epic poem In Parenthesis, about his wartime experiences, which was much lauded at the time, by the likes of TS Eliot.
There’s little evidence of that trauma in this Christmas card image, though perhaps there is a (Nashian?) hint of No Man’s Land in the gnarled tree stumps in the fore and background. Please note, the trees are regenerating new branches: make of that what you will.