Asolo exhibition opened at Oxford’s Ashmolean in October 1980 that appeared to mark the belated arrival of a major new painter. ‘For an intelligent artist to paint the familiar, and clearly to enjoy painting it,’ wrote critic and dealer David Carritt in the catalogue, ‘now demands single-mindedness and courage. Jean Jones has both.’
The city’s intelligentsia arrived en masse to assess this 53-year-old’s achievements – among them her husband John who was the university’s professor of poetry and her closest friend Iris Murdoch.
It looked that year as though Jones might be on her way to the upper echelons of British art. She had begun to exhibit at London’s New Grafton Gallery – which had championed English modernists such as John Nash and Keith Vaughan – and had earned some distinguished supporters. William Golding bought one of her pictures and Iris Murdoch collected three, announcing to A.N. Wilson that they would ‘one day be spoken of in the same breath as those of Van Gogh’.
It was not to be. Jones never secured gallery representation let alone another museum show after 1980 but she continued to paint almost until her death in obscurity in 2012. In spite of personal turmoil, her paintings attempt to find coherence and joy through close observation of her surroundings. This seemingly simple aim flew in the face of contemporary fashions for brash neo-expressionist painting and conceptual experimentation. Her work was too modest for a globalising market that demanded bold statements suitable for glitzy lobbies and plazas. Perhaps also she was too isolated in literary Oxford from the centres of visual art, busy discussing romantic poetry with John and Iris instead of networking with the School of London boys down in Soho.
Unlike champagne-swilling gambler Francis Bacon and absent father Lucian Freud, she was also burdened with the duties of family life and fighting for public recognition while in the shadow of her ambitious husband. Jones long recalled that when Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the scientist was referred to in the papers as an ‘Oxford housewife’. Most importantly, Jones suffered from bipolar disorder and her mental condition was worsening, exacerbated by years of medical misunderstanding. Doctors had prescribed her high doses of lithium in the 1970s – leaving her feeling ‘doped’ for months at a time – and then antidepressants that sent her into a mania and led to her being sectioned on the first of two occasions in 1983.
Arguments about injustices in the production of art history have become commonplace in recent decades among historians keen to diversify the canon (and gallerists excited to find new income streams). The point in Jones’s case is not to argue that her innovations were as dramatic or sustained as those of her more famous peers; she had neither the resources nor the sensibility to be as brutal as Bacon or ceaselessly experimental as David Hockney. It is rather to highlight the social conditions that enable artistic ‘genius’ and to insist that our understanding of art’s value is greatly enriched by looking beyond narratives of global stardom and the machinations of the market.
William Golding bought one of her pictures and Iris Murdoch collected three
This is not to say Jones was unserious. In her own understated way, she responded to the trials of her age and processed contemporary philosophical ideas, while incorporating scientific findings and aesthetic theories over the course of five decades. She was particularly influenced as she started painting by long discussions with Murdoch. The crucial idea she often jotted down, which featured in a lecture Murdoch gave in 1967, is simple: that art has moral value because it encourages us to attend to subjects outside ourselves, free from the ‘devouring Ego’, to make sense of things without recourse to personal fantasy or abstract theory.
It is unsurprising these words appealed to Jones at a time when she felt increasingly consumed by inner torment and, especially in the 1970s, when perceived blindness became one of the more acute symptoms of her illness. Painting could be a way to reconnect with her surroundings – a way, as she noted years later, to ‘lay feeling, not possessing hand on’ the world. Many of Jones’s artistic decisions were made with this aim in mind.
Following her hero Van Gogh, for example, she created all her colours using only the three primaries. This rigorous technique forces artists not to rely on premixed tubes but to look carefully at the subject before reconstructing specific hues – the unexpected pink on the moorland or a streak of green in a child’s cheek. Then, after reading J.J. Gibson’s optical science textbook The Perception of the Visual World (1950), she began distorting the edges of her pictures as a way of reproducing what Gibson calls the ‘gradient of clarity’ between peripheral vision and the eye’s ‘point of fixation’. In the late 1980s, she even oriented some of her square canvases diagonally to approximate the elliptical shape of the human visual field – a trick that suited Dartmoor’s immersive V-shaped valleys particularly well.
What makes Jones’s best works exciting is that rather than simply replicating subjects as they appeared to her, they convey her struggle to see clearly, to cling on to some sense of truth or clarity. ‘The Phillips’ Garden’ from 1988, for example, is a miscellany of expressive marks, loose dabs of yellow and dark green indicating overgrown trees and bushes, with a lone sapling rendered in smaller, neater strokes near the middle of the picture. The image has an unnerving fish-bowl effect, transporting the eye through masses of blurred confusion on to the crystal-clear ‘point of fixation’. The fragile sapling becomes like an optical life raft or an object of devotion – a lucid fragment in a world that seems to be dissolving before our eyes.
Jones had begun her artistic practice at the age of 35, inspired to take classes at the Ruskin School of Art by the almost-mystical accounts of painting in Van Gogh’s famous letters. After two painstaking years of life drawing, she began to paint and did so religiously every morning, in between caring for John and their two young children. Jones focused on a few favourite motifs within walking distance of her Oxford home and her remote holiday cottage on the southern edge of Dartmoor, painting each scene repeatedly as it changed over the seasons and on rainy days making sensitive portraits of her loved ones.
Almost 100 of the resulting pictures filled the Ashmolean in 1980 – of John listening intently to music, Oxford’s St Cross Church standing at the end of a grave-lined path, deer in Magdalen College glimpsed through blue railings. A series of views down the lane opposite Jones’s house showed off her ability to render rain-soaked grass, fallen leaves turning to mulch, a grey sky as the sun begins to break through. And there were more than a dozen canvases painted from the centre of Ringmoor, an ancient stone circle on Dartmoor, in which orderly megaliths interact with wild swirls of moor and sky beyond. In the most striking of these, painted during the heatwave summer of 1976, the dazzling orange grass seems to envelop the stones, their neat geometry eroded by the recalcitrant force of nature.
Born in 1927, Jones grew up in a society ravaged by world wars, her father traumatised by the trenches of the first and her own youth in London disrupted by evacuation during the second. She then struggled through adult life with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and felt alienated from the scholarly and hyper-masculine milieu of post-war Oxford. Carritt was right. Jones needed ‘single-mindedness and courage’ in abundance to keep going to her easel every morning, developing her work over the decades and continually engaging with her surroundings in spite of it all.
In October 2020, 40 years after the Ashmolean show, an exhibition titled Jean Jones: Dartmoor’s Forgotten Painter opened at Brownston Gallery in Devon, just a short drive from her cottage and her much-loved Ringmoor stones. Orchestrated by Jones’s grandchildren, it was the first in an ongoing series displaying some of the hundreds of finished canvases she left behind when she died. Her pictures, struggling against self-indulgence and uncertainty, resonate today. Each one represents days staring obsessively at its subject, reminding us in our age of scattered attention and vain anxiety of the value of close looking and of laying a ‘feeling, not possessing hand on’ the world beyond ourselves.
Michael Kurtz’s Jean Jones: and the Love of Painting is published by Halstar.
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