Four Works by David Jones: Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art Auction

Waddington’s is pleased to offer four works by British artist David Jones in our January Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art auction, from the estate of Professor William Blissett. To accompany the works, Dr. Robin D’Souza has kindly written the following texts to shed more light on these artworks.

Dr. Robin D’Souza received her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto in the spring of 2022. Her dissertation examines the use of chivalric romance in 20th century British literature. More recently, Dr. D’Souza has been investigating and digitally transcribing David Jones’s writings as part of an international collaborative effort, the David Jones Digital Archive, working directly with Professor Blissett.

Mehefin, 1930

Painted in 1930, Mehefin belongs to a significant period in David Jones’s artistic life, just prior to the psychological breakdown he suffered in 1932. The title is the Welsh word for the month of June (it translates literally as “midsummer”), and the use of Welsh anchors the work in Jones’s enduring sense of cultural and linguistic inheritance, while the image itself exemplifies a recurring motif in his paintings: the view through a window.

Jones produced many watercolours featuring windows, sills, flowers, and interior thresholds. These images are neither simple domestic scenes nor conventional landscapes. Instead, they function as sites of mediation, and they carefully negotiate the boundary between inside and outside, enclosure and openness. In Mehefin, the window does not separate the viewer from the world so much as invite the exterior inward, allowing light, colour, and remembered landscape to permeate the interior space.

The work demonstrates Jones’s characteristic restraint and attentiveness to tonal harmony. The scene beyond the window is not rendered with topographical precision but is treated as a source of light. As in his poetry, Jones is less concerned with description than with presence. There is a chair there, implying the presence of the artist, and inviting the viewer to sit down and drink in the light and the colours.

In retrospect, these window compositions acquire added poignancy in light of Jones’s later life. After his service with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the First World War, Jones suffered long-term psychological effects, including severe anxiety and, later, agoraphobia. While Mehefin predates the most acute phases of this struggle, its inward vantage suggests an early articulation of a sensibility drawn to thresholds—spaces that allow connection without exposure. The window becomes a means of reconciling vulnerability with attention, a way of sustaining contact with the world while remaining sheltered.

Rather than retreating from reality, Mehefin exemplifies Jones’s distinctive response to it. The work expresses a desire to dissolve barriers gently, to allow the beauty of the external world to be received, contemplated, and re-formed within the quiet order of sign-making. In this sense, the painting reflects Jones’s broader artistic vision: art as a means to bring together the interior life, cultural memory, and the sacramental depth present in the visible world.

THE VICTIM: DRAWING FOR TAILPIECE TO IN PARENTHESIS

The Victim is a powerful variant drawing associated with David Jones’s epic war poem In Parenthesis (1937). The poem details Jones’s experiences as a soldier during World War I. Although not the image reproduced in the first published edition of the poem, this drawing is closely related to the tailpiece that faces a Latin inscription on the verso in the book.

The Latin text is also included here on the back of this version, in David Jones’s hand, with some differences between this text and the published version. Jones footnotes various scriptures in the use of these lines at the end of In Parenthesis. In this version of the drawing, the Latin text could be translated as references to the books of Revelation and Isaiah: “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the centre of the throne,” and “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” The drawing and text together form a single symbolic meditation on sacrifice, memory, and loss.

The image depicts a goat ensnared in a thorny thicket that, upon closer inspection, resolves into First World War barbed wire. Behind it stretches a devastated landscape of blasted trees, recalling the wasteland imagery of In Parenthesis and, more specifically, the shattered woods of Mametz—where Jones himself fought as a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The goat caught in the thicket alludes directly to the binding of Isaac in Genesis, when a sacrificial victim is providentially supplied in place of the son. For Jones, this biblical reference is inseparable from the experience of the war dead: soldiers who, in a tragic and morally fraught sense, became scapegoats of history.

Jones’s understanding of victimhood was never simple. He recognized, with clear-eyed sorrow, the injustice of the soldiers’ suffering—young men subjected to violence they neither deserved nor fully understood. Yet his Catholic faith led him to resist the conclusion that such suffering was therefore meaningless. In In Parenthesis, and in images such as The Victim, Jones holds together two seemingly irreconcilable truths: the war was wasteful and catastrophic, and yet the endurance and gift of those who suffered and died during the war possessed a tragic and even sacramental value.

The trees in the background deepen this idea. They recall not only the shattered woods of the Western Front but also the long mythical and theological associations of wood in Jones’s imagination—culminating in the wood of the Cross. As throughout his work, Jones allows multiple temporal and symbolic orders to coexist: biblical sacrifice, classical myth, medieval typology, and modern industrial war are held in uneasy suspension.

What anchors the image, however, is not the ravaged ground but the sky above it. The upper portion of the composition opens onto a luminous, star-filled night, with the moon prominently visible. In In Parenthesis, the moon is a source of beauty and orientation amid destruction. For soldiers in the trenches, the night sky often represented the last unspoiled fragment of the natural world that they could see—a reminder of order and hope. Jones invests this celestial imagery with Marian resonance: the moon, traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, becomes a figure of reflected light and faithful presence, offering consolation rather than escape.

In this version of the drawing, the goat strains upward: its gaze is directly towards the moon. The gesture intensifies the image’s emotional and theological tension. Suffering reaches not toward resolution but toward illumination. The Victim thus stands as one of Jones’s most concentrated visual expressions of mourning. It is haunting and deeply ambivalent. It neither redeems the war nor abandons meaning altogether, but bears witness to a world in which loss, love, and hope remain painfully and inseparably entwined.

Girl Wearing a Jacket, and Woman looking out to sea

These two smaller sketches offer an intimate glimpse into David Jones’s practice as a draftsman, revealing the quiet attentiveness that underlies both his visual art and his poetry. Executed in pencil, ink, and crayon, they demonstrate Jones’s economy of line and his sensitivity to posture and gesture. The figures are lightly held within the page, suggesting observation rather than formal portraiture. Though smaller in scale, the works resonate with themes that recur throughout Jones’s work: inwardness, stillness, and attentiveness.

Woman Looking Out to Sea, (which will be featured in Waddington’s March 2026 auction of Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art), in particular evokes a familiar Jonesian posture—figures oriented toward distance, horizon, or the threshold—while Girl Wearing a Jacket conveys a sense of contained individuality.

A Note on Dr. William Blissett’s Collection, and His Contribution to the Study of David Jones:

Dr. William Blissett (1921–2025) was a distinguished literary scholar whose lifelong engagement with David Jones helped shape the North American study and reception of one of the twentieth century’s most complex artist-writers.

Blissett’s deep and sustained interest in Jones began in the late 1950s and continued through decades of correspondence, personal visits, and scholarly reflection. Over many years he cultivated a warm intellectual friendship with Jones himself, visiting regularly in the poet-painter’s Hampstead home and recording conversations that would later appear in The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones (1981), an affectionate and invaluable account of their exchanges on poetry, art, and faith. His scholarship on Jones ranged from published essays on In Parenthesis to contributions in critical journals. He always demonstrated rigorous textual awareness and personal insight into Jones’s literary and artistic intentions.

Blissett was also a committed collector of Jones’s works and related materials, a role that has had enduring benefits for students and scholars. The William Blissett Jones Collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (University of Toronto) consists of books by and about David Jones, including first editions, correspondence, and artworks that Blissett assembled over the years. This material has enriched the Fisher Library’s holdings and made it possible for subsequent generations to engage directly with primary sources, particularly at a time when formal archival collections of Jones material were still developing.

Blissett’s contribution extends beyond the material collection to his influence as a mentor, editor, and advocate for the serious study of Jones. He served for many years as editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly and continued publishing on major literary figures—including T. S. Eliot and Spenser—well into his later years. In obituaries and commemorations, his status as “a world authority on Jones” has been widely acknowledged, with praise for both his scholarly range and his personal generosity in fostering dialogue among students and colleagues. The presence of his collection at Toronto, and this art collection at Waddington’s, thus stands as a testament to his commitment to preserving and interpreting Jones’s work, ensuring that critical engagement with one of modernism’s most distinctive voices remains vibrant.

We would like to credit the following sources for this note on Dr. Blissett:

https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/news/literary-life-and-times-english-professor-william-blissett?utm

https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/theglobeandmail/name/william-blisset-obituary?id=59821712&utm

About the auction

Our Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art auction showcases Canadian highlights including works by Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, A.J. Casson, P.C. Sheppard, Frederick Arthur Verner, and Gerald Ferguson. Other standouts include Post-War and Contemporary works by John Little, Louis de Niverville, Doris McCarthy, John Kasyn, Kazuo Nakamura, Francisco da Silva, Dietz Edzard, Yehouda Chaki. Rounding out the auction is an enticing Parisian scene by Edouard Cortès and an excellent watercolour by David Jones.

Please contact us for more information.

The auction begins to close January 29, 2026 at 2 pm ET.  Please ensure you are registered to bid.

On view at our Toronto gallery located at 100 Broadview Avenue:
 Monday, January 26 from 10 am to 5 pm
 Tuesday, January 27 from 10 am to 5 pm
Or by appointment.