Welsh Journals

clean-cut close of the occupation, excluding all transitional Celto- Roman objects, fixes the date in the mid-first century A.D. The occasion may have been that so vividly described by Tacitus, when Suetonius Paulinus and his legions fought in Mona against Druids, their clients and household warriors, and the refugees from Lowland Britain east of the Fossway who helped them. By courtesy of The Times, March 7, 1944 An Exhibition of the Work of David Jones IN the latter half of 1943 C.E.M.A. took a small collection of paintings by Cedric Morris to various centres in Wales. At the close of the exhibition an appeal was received from some of those who had enjoyed it for another opportunity to see work by a contemporary Welsh artist. Happily it has been possible to follow up this request by arranging an exhibition of pictures by David Jones. It is particularly appropriate that the work of this artist should be shown in Wales, for although born on the outskirts of London, he owes a great debt to his Celtic ancestry. Born in 1895, David Jones comes from a family of farmers and craftsmen who lived and worked for many years in the shadow of the Clwydian Hills. From this stock he has inherited a strong sense of race, of belonging to the Welsh people, a sense that was nurtured in him by his father. From this source also he may have inherited his feeling for fine craftsmanship which gives strength to the expression of his Celtic imagination. After a short period as a student he enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915 and served in France for three years, but it was not until nearly twenty years later that his experiences as a soldier crystallized into a number of war drawings (an example of which is shown in No. 7) and the Hawthornden Prize Novel In Parenthesis. Soon after demobilization and a brief attempt to reconcile himself again to the life of an art student, he entered the Roman Catholic Church and joined Eric Gill in Sussex. With Gill he learnt the crafts of wood- and line-engraving, and in these mediums has produced some of his finest work. A selection of these prints, including the magnificent illustrations to the medieval Chester Play of The Deluge and his line-engravings illustrating The Ancient Mariner are included in this exhibition. The greater part of his artistic output has, however, been in the form of watercolours and so, naturally, they predominate in this collection.