For over three decades, devotees of the painter-poet David Jones have waited eagerly for the definitive biography and attendant revelations concerning this extraordinary artist and poet, and they have not been disappointed. Thomas Dilworth’s book is a compelling read, and his claim that Jones was the greatest native British Modernist working in twentieth century Britain is convincingly articulated. Among the many scholars who have devoted much of their attention to Jones, Dilworth is the one who has spent most of his life preoccupied by this “sui generis,” as he describes Jones in line one. Having first met him in 1971, just three years before his death, Dilworth visited Jones on three further occasions. In each, the poet-painter volunteered much information about himself, his life and times, his family, friends, and travels, and responded generously the biographer’s questions. The latter’s admiration for this exceptionally affectionate and endearing man increased exponentially.
Despite the size of the book, it is eminently readable and undaunting. This owes a lot to Dilworth’s pliant literary style, but also to his organization, like grouping the text into bite-sized pieces. After a brief Preface, where he quotes a number of distinguished writers’ and scholars’ appreciative comments on Jones, the content is organized into a series of concentric bundles, in six Parts. Each Part—save for the ultimate one where, despite Jones’s declining health, he also enjoyed all sorts of accolades, tributes and awards, he met the Royal Family, completed his final painted masterpiece, Annunciation in a Welsh Hill Setting (1963), gave broadcasts and interviews as well being visited by many celebrities and friends, together with people with interesting and intellectual reputations —consists of either two or three chapters, and most of them are around fifty pages in length. Moreover, the text is such that it accommodates all sorts of readers: those who are avid followers of Jones and are completely familiar with him and his work, those who are seriously interested in him in a pragmatic sense and are intent on perceiving him in the context of his life and times and the now, and also those who are mildly curious about this awesome character, as well as those who are quite unfamiliar with the man and his work.
The first Part, appropriately enough, is entitled “Beginnings,” and commences with the birth of David Jones on November 1, 1895 in Brockley, Kent, then on the outskirts of London before it was subsumed into the city. He was the last of three children born to James Jones (1860-1943) and Alice Bradshaw (1854-1937). James hailed from north Wales, and in 1885 arrived in London and found work as a printer’s overseer for the periodical, The Christian Herald, an eminently suitable occupation for this devout Anglican and lay preacher, who read the Bible to his family each evening. In 1888, he married Alice whose family were shipwrights living in neighboring Rotherhithe, on the river Thames. Alice’s father, Ed Bradshaw, was a mast and block maker who could identify the different species of imported wood that was stored in the dockyards.Known for his exemplary craftsmanship in shipbuilding, he compared his materials of wood to those of the Cross on which Christ, as “the living wood” was crucified for mankind’s salvation. This sentiment chimed with Jones’s own beliefs, and he appropriated his maternal grandfather’s opinions by adopting him as the narrator in the “Redriff” section of The Anathémata (1952), Jones’s most comprehensive, illustrated long poem. Such biographical information is important to understanding the wide scope of Jones’s poetry which is crammed with experiential memories that, however apparently trivial, insinuate themselves into his writing, thus enriching the authenticity and originality of his poetry. Dilworth draws our attention to these details and advises us of the title of the works—poetry or paintings—in which they appear.
Clearly, Jones had a formidable memory, as testified by the many friends, family, and scholars who knew him. He claimed that his first memory was in 1900, when he was woken by the clattering hooves of cavalry horses passing the house: the soldiers were parading through the streets before going to fight in the Boer War. This encounter, and the fact that his artistic mother’s pictures of horses decorated the walls of their home, left Jones with a penchant for horses, and a yearning to ride—an ambition that was never fulfilled.
Within the first few pages, we are treated to reproductions of Jones’s early artworks, which demonstrate his precocious talent for drawing, together with his fondness for animals, as shown in four of the five illustrations he made between the ages of six and eleven. In them, wild beasts are alert in their natural habitat, save for The Bear (1903), his “favorite drawing.” Jones treasured this sketch of unmitigated pathos where the tethered animal, removed from its natural surroundings, is forced on its hind legs and made to dance by its keeper in front of a wooden fence. Jones’s empathy with the wretched creature is manifest in the sensitivity of the strokes that define the bear’s coat and the hesitant outlines describing its form. His older sister admonished him for using a ruler to depict the authentic looking fence, but he ignored her. Aside from this drawing representing injustice and cruelty, it exhibits Jones’s powers of observation, his extraordinary mastery of drawing, and his compassion for dumb animals. Observing these endearing inclinations, his mother took him to the British Museum, and to Regent’s Park Zoo. The former was a veritable treasure trove, while in the other, he delighted in drawing the animals.
As is fitting for a text about an artist, there is a generous number of assorted illustrations which often furnish us with additional information alongside the narrative. Among the vast array of images (163 altogether) that are reproduced here, many are of Jones’s own artworks, others are mainly reproductions of photographs of friends and some are of significant places in relation to Jones’s life and work. The images are dispersed throughout the text being sequentially placed to accompany the artist’s life as the narrative unfolds. This allows the reader to navigate pictorially through the text: the images are like signposts that emphasize significant episodes of Jones’s life, and the people who made an impression on him. In many ways and because they are sequenced chronologically, the story of Jones’s life is, from time to time, revealed through images as, for example, in Chapter 6. The illustrations are commendable, not only for their distribution commensurate with the storylines, but also for their quality. It isn’t often that we find a book of this nature, and its modest price, which contains illustrations which are “patient of reproduction,” as Jones might have said.
Given Jones’s primary interest, we might anticipate the inclusion of illustrations, and we find them used as functional endpapers, which comprise facsimiles of pages from the original manuscript of his epic poem, In Parenthesis,1937. Together with the roughly handwritten stanzas of verse, there are drawings, or doodles, of soldiers, women, and animals – including a drawing of Melpomené, the mythical Muse of Chorus (song and dance), cradling a parrot. In the landscape setting, are three hills, recalling those Jones looked out on, and often sketched, when living in the Black Mountains from 1924 to 1928. These endpapers effectively frame the volume. While examining the many redacted words in these endpapers, we can even glimpse the proposed layout of the verse, in Jones’s hand. These manuscripts also suggest we are privy to Jones’s thoughts as he reviewed his poetry, or alternatively, what was perhaps on his mind when he took a break from writing!
At school, Jones found reading difficult, declaring that he was “appallingly bad” at his studies. He paid his sister a penny a time to read to him, usually stories concerning gallant knights in armor fighting for virtuous causes, and other tales of adventure. However, at school and at home, he persevered with reading history books, from tales of the Roman Empire and mythology, to contemporary literature and past heroes, and actually walked from Brockley to Blackheath in order to examine the Lord Nelson memorabilia at Greenwich. He subsequently became obsessive about reading, and started to collect books, many of which were on Welsh topics and the ancient Celtic peoples. His curiosity about Wales was instilled in him by his father singing songs and hymns in Welsh. When the family visited Rhos-on-Sea on the north Welsh coast in 1904, Jones felt a great affinity with the country, its holy wells and ruined castles, and its curious language. Later, he declared that a rubicon had been crossed on that first encounter where he and his cousins played around St. Trillo’s Chapel on the shoreline, and sometimes in the ruins of a thirteenth century castle which the Welsh princes had frequented. Being in Wales brought to mind those stories his father had related to him about his homeland’s heroes and villains, princes and poets in a country that, for Jones, was all but enchanted: it represented a place where the native heritage and culture remained linked to its ancient past. Here was a legacy that had not been corrupted or subjugated by alien cultures and invaders. On subsequent visits, he absorbed the sound of the Welsh language, and repeated the names of hills and homesteads, yet despite his efforts, he regretted not being able to converse in Welsh.
Owing to his predilection for drawing, it seemed natural when, in 1909, he went to art school, with ambitions either to illustrate Welsh legends, or become an animal artist. He enjoyed drawing from the antique, where large plaster casts of Roman gods were familiar to him from his visits to the British Museum, and which were a prequel to his joining the life drawing class. He was taught by two encouraging tutors, Reginald Savage and A.S. Hartrick, and responded to their suggestions to explore the Zoo, the National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He learnt about the then fashionable Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and was also made aware of European trends, like the Impressionists: he saw two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery, in 1911 and 1912, but it was the British painter J.W.M. Turner that he most admired.
Towards the end of his studies, he confessed to being a bit muddle-headed about his future. But the First World War intervened and spared him having to make a decision. Like his two close college friends, Harold Hawkins and Frank Medworth he too was keen to join the army, and in 1915 he enlisted with the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a foot-soldier. He trained enthusiastically and by the time he was serving in the trenches in France, he was a crack shot, but his zeal waned as the senseless conflict persisted over the years. He fought on the front line and endured atrocious climatic and social conditions, witnessed numerous casualties and wholesale slaughter, before sustaining an injurious leg wound at the Battle of Mametz Wood on the Somme in July 1916. While at home on sick leave, and at the behest of his former tutor, he illustrated a scene from the battleground where the soldiers are clad in contemporary army uniforms. In his other illustrations at this time, Jones reverted to drawing easily recognizable stereotypical, somewhat romanticized, figures, probably because at that period there were few other types of role models being depicted in books and magazines.
After recuperating from his war wounds in England, Jones returned to the trenches and, although not in the front line, fought at Ypres and also Passchendaele, where conditions were no better than those that had prevailed at the Somme. He remained in the army until he was demobbed in 1919, which made him the longest serving poet in the Great War. Like so many others who survived the devastation of the conflict, he was haunted by his memories, and a victim of post-traumatic stress. Consequently, his mental health was affected at various periods of his life, despite intermittent expert medical attention.
He returned to art school in 1919, this time to Westminster College of Art, where he was occasionally taught by Sickert. He also met a few Catholic students, and relished joining their discussions, and participating in arguments on art theory, politics, and religion, as well as the Mass. He mused that art was not simply the impression or imitation of a thing, but that it was a re-presentation of the thing under the species of paint. Motivated by his friends’ convictions concerning Catholicism, he started to read the Roman missal, and sometimes popped out of class to observe a “bit of High Mass” in nearby Westminster Cathedral. He subsequently went on to seek formal instruction in the Catholic faith and was introduced to Fr. John O’Connor, an intelligent, cultured priest, who convinced him of the analogy between Eucharist and the Incarnation. O’Connor advised Jones to visit Eric Gill, another Roman Catholic convert who had formed a religious fraternity of craftspeople with the intention of the brothers becoming a self-sufficient community, in Ditchling, Sussex. They produced religious pamphlets and books, which were printed in the small press on site. Impressed by Gill, Jones visited several times, sometimes staying for successive nights at a time. He admired the work produced, and was taught wood- and metal-engraving for the purpose of illustrating the press’s publications.
Jones’s father was “amazed” when Jones informed him that he was converting to Catholicism. Jones was subsequently baptized into the Catholic Church on 7 September, 1921, having concluded that the Roman Church was the one religion that had united all Christians, until the Reformation. At Ditchling, he became a highly successful engraver, while also continuing his painting. Furthermore, he became engaged to Gill’s middle daughter, Petra. The engagement was not sustainable, although their friendship continued until Jones’s death in 1974.
When Gill and his entourage moved from Sussex to an abandoned monastery at Capel-y-ffin near Abergavenny in Wales, Jones followed the group at Christmas 1924. His time in this remote mountain village was his most sustained period of living in Wales. Much as he professed allegiance to his fatherland, he spent a long time thinking and reading about the country, its history and language, but spent scant time there. This was despite the fact that in Wales he found a new direction to take his art, whereby he shed the conventionalized, stylized drawing and painting of what had been learned, as opposed to what is intuited and spontaneous, and he destroyed all his pre-1925 artwork. The development of this libertine approach can be observed in his mountainous landscapes where the hills, trees and streams capture the rhythmic flourishes of vegetation, foliage and rivers on the windy hillsides. By 1927, everything he painted moved – nothing was static, but seemed animated and free. His concern for rhythm, tone and texture, critical characteristics in wood- and metal-engraving, further enriched the character of his drawing. But perhaps the most significant feature of his dynamic approach is the multivalent perspectives that inform his vision, so that as viewers we seem to see the objects from several different angles, almost as if we too are moving through the picture. His landscapes were further enhanced by the seascapes that he painted when lodging with the Benedictine monks on Caldy Island, off Pembrokeshire. The early paintings are accurately drawn and firm, well-observed, confident endeavors, while the later images register the same vigorous land- and sea-scapes that energize the works of the late 1920s. He delighted in painting the turbulent sea on Caldy’s coast, and later those that he viewed from the beach house at Portslade, that was loaned to his parents. On his visits home to Brockley, he continued to draw, whether the interiors of his parents’ house, or scenes from the windows, or those in the garden.
These assured, highly skilled works gave way to the dynamic, vibrant pictures where a sense of flux, of shapes materializing and dissolving, then morphing into others, or sometimes disappearing and suddenly reasserting themselves mark this, the most prolific period of his life when he produced an astonishing mount of work. Between 1928 and 1932, the fluidity of his watercolors seems to shimmer and dance, as if animated by a breeze, or perhaps the Holy Spirit is a more apposite simile in the case of Jones. The still-lifes he painted are among his most exciting selection of paintings in terms of variations on a theme. Briefly, as in Briar Cup (1931), a jug of flowers is situated on a table, this one is circular, and echoes the circular items and motifs on the table as well as the teapot and casserole dish that seem to levitate above the table, itself in front of a window which looks out onto a landscape, although the garden and the interior encroach on one another’s spaces. The serpentining briars, their thorns exaggerated, remind us, in the context, that this picture evokes the Crucifixion, where the crown of thorns denote Christ’s kingship – there are usually references to Christ in Jones’s pictures, and this one is shot through with Christian symbols. With its tousled, unstable appearance, this is a precursor of the delicate, controlled, extraordinary translucent Flora in Calix-light (1950), which resonates a numinous that seems to penetrate the entire ambiance including the linen tablecloth on which stand three goblets, like the three trees at Calvary. Close observation shows that only the central glass contains the living water and the flowers, together with the arabesquing brambles.
When Gill finally relocated to Pigotts, a farmstead with outhouses that could be converted to workshops near High Wycombe, and relatively close to London from where most of his commissions emanated, Jones returned to Brockley and painted The Artist’s Worktable (1929). Dilworth compares the sharply drawn objects with the fluency of paint, claiming that Jones’s methods in picture-making anticipate the same processes he would adopt in his writings. Moreover, he argues that Jones’s exemplary wood-engravings that illustrate The Chester Play of the Deluge (1927), are autobiographical, just as his writings are sourced in his own experiences, and with good reason. Dilworth’s analysis is revelatory in his commentary when he observes that each illustration for the flood follows the temporal sequence of the medieval play, the narrative. However, the first five images mirror the second five, in reverse. This extraordinary consciousness of patterns, of making symmetries, of what Dilworth calls “chiasmic correspondences” seems to be embedded in Jones’s thought processes, rather than something learnt, or contrived.
In 1928 he joined Gill when he was holidaying in France, and painted relentlessly wherever they went. His Autumn exhibition was a sell-out, and he was invited to join the 7 & 5 Society, the most avant-garde group of artists in England at that time. Being in France reminded him of his previous sojourn in that country, and the memory of the war years may have insinuated themselves into his psyche. That same year he made a few drawings, and started to scribble some sentences of his memories concerning the battlefields; this was the beginning of his “attempt to make a shape in words.” Having reached the pinnacle of his career as a painter, he now considered words as his medium, and so his reminiscences of the discomfort of the trenches and dugouts were manifested in a unique poetic format and language: In Parenthesis was the result.
The main writing of his epic war book was concluded in 1932. During these years he also painted incessantly, as if charged with energy. And then it all stopped! In October, he suffered the first bouts of shell-shock as it was known then, which manifested in an extremely disturbed mind. All of 1933 was spent vacillating between depression, terror and anxiety: there was no soothing him. His good friend Tom Burns organized a rest cure for him to the Holy Land and, while not a complete cure, it certainly brought him intervals of relief. When staying in Jerusalem he noticed helmeted British soldiers on duty. With their riot shields and batons, he imagined them as Roman soldiers occupying the city at the time of the Crucifixion, when sentries kept vigil on the city walls. He later declared that his subsequent writings were influenced by what he saw on that occasion, and that this sighting was the source of his Roman poems, which are collected in The Sleeping Lord and other fragments (1974).
Towards the end of the decade, his depression lifted and he started to paint again. He had spent most of his time in the Fort Hotel at Sidmouth, as advised by his friend the cultural historian Christopher Dawson, or visiting friends, and sometimes at Brockley. He was also visited by friends, the vast majority of which remained close to him for the best part of his life. This was the nature of the man: he loved people, and people loved him; his infectious personality and his basic love and humanity resulted in almost everyone who met him feeling a special affection for him.
Throughout the text, Dilworth is consistent in apprising us with the contextual situation of Britain in relation to the world. We are reminded of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland. At home, King Edward VIII abdicated from the English throne, which upset Jones and his friends. The following year was a rather turbulent one. In Parenthesis was published to critical acclaim, and Jones subsequently received praise and accolades from many quarters. He was particularly heartened by the remarks of those he admired, especially T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Graham Greene. His fame as a painter was already confirmed, and now he was gaining a reputation as a Modernist poet. His fascination with words was a trend that continued, and he started to write some notes that were the basis of “The Book of Balaam’s Ass,” which would be published posthumously in the collection The Roman Quarry (1981). Also in 1937, his mother died of a stroke, and Jones marked her grave with a tombstone carved by Eric Gill—at a cost! Shortly afterwards he accompanied his father to north Wales, where he found Rhos-on-Sea much altered, having become a ‘suburban sprawl a “wilderness of villas and bungalows.”’ The following year he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for In Parenthesis, which included a welcome check for £100. In his acceptance speech he advocated that he “felt, more clearly than before, the unity of the Arts.” Throughout his life he sought unity among the apparent disparity and incongruity of our lives, believing instead of gathering everything in together. Hence his desire to demonstrate this notion in the union of word and image, where lettering became the focus of his paintings.
With World War II in the offing Jones, who had hoped the war would be averted, spent most of his time in London and, despite the bombs and the blitz, seemed to thrive on living there, usually in the company of friends. Latterly, he lodged with Harman Grisewood and his new wife Margaret, for whom he wrote two poems. These were unpublished until Dilworth edited them, and included a contextual commentary, in 2002. In these poems, Jones envisages Margaret as a goddess, perhaps anticipating his painting of Guinever (1940). This is one of several mythological paintings that he considered doing, and he moved into independent lodgings, while also continuing to fraternize with his many friends. In November Gill died, and Jones wrote an appreciation of him for The Tablet, but was unable to attend the funeral, having been told that morning that his father had suffered a heart attack and was in hospital. Jones rushed to his father’s bedside, and subsequently visited him daily despite having to travel long distances, even after the patient was transferred to a nursing home in Sydenham.
Jones was also painting at this period, and looked to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, which had been a powerful influence in his writing of In Parenthesis, for a sequel to Guinever, namely, The Four Queens (1941). This a crowded, complex work where the knight is tempted by the malicious queens, is set against the hills of Capel-y-ffin, the most Celtic landscape in which Jones had lived. This work was followed by Aphrodite in Aulis (1941), an equally complicated picture where the goddess stands atop a marble column. At each side of the column are two sentries wearing contemporary helmets, denoting that one is a British soldier, and the other a German, implying the comradeship between them. These pictures were purchased by the Tate Gallery, where its director John Rothenstein had the backing of Kenneth Clark, the art historian, as well as Jones’s good friend Jim Ede, who finally vacated his job at the Tate, in order to settle in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.
In 1943, Jones’s father died, and that evening Jones supped with his good friends, Nicolete and Basil Gray. Jones first met Nicolete in 1929 when she was reading medieval history at Oxford. She was also an art scholar who developed an intense interest in lettering and calligraphy, which further endeared her to Jones. From 1943 until 1947 he was a weekly visitor at the Gray house, where lively discussions with like-minded guests were frequent. Nicolete, who had spent time in Italy studying ancient letter-forms, gave every encouragement to Jones when he started to create pictures using only letter-forms. These “painted inscriptions” as he called them, were distinctive, being in his own hand. Moreover, each letter was a one-off, as it had to fit comfortably with its neighbors. The majority of these works comprised short quotations in Latin, medieval English or Welsh. They were designed for the impact of their visual aesthetic, and were not meant to be read. Jones wanted the viewer to absorb the integration of rhythm, color, form, shape, line and tone, to be able to appreciate the abstract nature of them. Of course, for the viewer who could read and translate the script, the piece was loaded with further meanings. The simplicity of the designs made these some of his most attractive works where the synergy of word and image is made manifest.
But Jones was not creative all of the time. He suffered another bout of post-traumatic stress, and in 1947 was admitted to Bowden House nursing home, in Harrow, where he stayed for nearly six months. In August he started to paint again, drawing trees from the window in a style that was loose and free. He moved into lodgings near Harrow School (convenient for the nursing home), where he met an assortment of scholars and teachers whom he impressed by his erudite conversations and knowledge store. He also drew and painted women, some from imagination, others that he saw on their way to Mass. He continued to paint trees, which presaged his masterpiece Vexilla Regis (1948). This painting of three trees represents the scene of the Crucifixion where Jones employs many iconic symbols to evoke Christ’s Passion. True to form, the hills of Capel-y-ffin are in the distant background where Jones’s penchant for situating landscapes and motifs that are heavily nuanced, is evident. This is Jones in recovery mood, and he soon requested that his long piece of writing be brought to him. This was the manuscript of his greatest long poem, The Anathémata that, while based on the Mass, concerns the history of Western culture and includes a good deal of material that is based on Jones’s experiences or, as he announced in his Preface, “a heap of all that … [he] could find.”
What is extraordinary about the format of this work is that Jones has choreographed this poem just as he had done with his illustrations for The Chester Play of the Deluge. The Anathémata starts and finishes with the elevation of the host at Mass. Jones subsequently, and at intervals, inserted other material in between this material, and this extra matter consisted of a combination of variously selected, rewritten and new material. The poem was continually broken up in order to insert subsequent ideas. Accordingly, the whole poem takes the form of a ball, whereby the central kernal is successively surrounded by further material, which itself is wrapped within a further layer of additional material and so on, intimating a continuous cycle. The poem was finally published in 1952. Its reception received mixed reviews because of the complexity and density of the concepts, the inclusion of foreign languages, and the abundance of footnotes. However, Jones’s friends rallied, declaring that such criticism was a rejection of modernism, and that this could be attributed to the straightened conditions of the country following the war. The next year a dramatized version of The Anathémata was broadcast on the BBC, which Jones found acceptable.
During the 50s, he was continually exhibiting paintings, and also engaged in writing, for which he was awarded the American prize, the Harriet Munroe Memorial, for poetry. He was also awarded the OBE in the Queen’s birthday honors, and in 1959, his first publication of collected prose was published. The year before, he had met Valerie Price, a Welsh girl living in London who was engaged to be married. She was young, beautiful and a native Welsh speaker who was passionate about Wales. This was the first native Welsh girl with which Jones was really familiar, and he, at some thirty-nine years her senior, fell incurably in love with her. Knowing his love would remain unrequited, and as a tribute to her beauty, he painted The Lee Shore (1959). In it, Valerie is the personification of Velasquez’s The Rokeby Venus (c.1650), and is accompanied by Cupid holding his mirror up to Venus, who reclines sensually on the bed, her back to the viewer. The composition is characteristically filled with all sorts of items of value-added symbols associated with the goddess. The painting is beautifully composed and finely and delicately wrought. This is an image about love by a suitor who was utterly infatuated. They remained firm friends while Valerie was in London, and subsequently corresponded over a number of years, and latterly by telephone.
Prizes, awards, accolades and exhibitions honored Jones throughout the sixties, and indeed until the end of his life, despite the fact that in 1963, owing to his nervous disposition, he began his heavy treatment with drugs. While these medicines could alleviate his agitated brain, they had a devastating effect on his agile and enquiring mind. Dilworth makes the point about how much additional unprecedented, creative and imaginative material might have issued from Jones, were it not for the duping of his senses.
Perhaps it was inevitable that, given Jones’s delicate and enfeebled condition, he injured himself in a fall in 1970. He never really recovered from this accident, being unable to walk without assistance. He was taken to Calvary Nursing Home in Harrow where, in 1974 he died, a few months after he was made a Companion of Honour—a curiously apposite title for a man who was so desirous of intelligent, artistic and entertaining company.
Reviewed by Anne Price-Owen, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet
by Thomas Dilworth
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Hardcover / 432 pages / 2017
ISBN: 978-0-224-04460-8
Illustration: David Jones, Briar Cup ((1932). Pencil and watercolour. 56.5 x 55.2 cm. (22.5 x 21.75 inches)
Published on December 21, 2017