David Jones at Pallant House, Chichester

What a genius was David Jones! And what an epoch in the history of British art was the twentieth century.  Underappreciated, perhaps - or perhaps now at last starting really to revel in the recognition it deserves? From the recent success of the Ravilious exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the summer of 2015, and thinking back to Edward Burra at Pallant House Gallery a year or two ago, or Graham Sutherland at the Museum of Art, Oxford - there have been some wonderful shows in recent years, revealing so much that was exciting about painting and drawing in this country - especially through the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. This no doubt was a combination of the reaction to Modernism, combined with the response to two devastating world wars - as well as the intervening crises of economic depression and political turmoil, all combining to produce something sublimely electric in the world of British art. (And add to this, I would suggest, the longer tradition of British art to look back at and draw upon - the Pre-Raphaelites, Samuel Palmer and William Blake, J.M.W. Turner and Constable, when art in England started to rediscover itself after the long invasion of more foreign influences that started somewhere around the time of Charles I and Anthony Van Dyck. When I go to the National Portrait Gallery or Tate Britain it's always among the Tudors that I want to linger - it all seems to start going wrong after about 1600 - the time when the continent and the High Renaissance starts to overwhelm the native, more northern European tradition; Holbein and Marcus Gheeraerts seem more cut from the same English cloth as two of my other favourite portraitists, Robert Peake and Isaac Oliver.)

This is the largest collection of David Jones work that I've seen all together in one place; an artist whose work I think I first grew to love on seeing it at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge two decades ago. Though Jones was born in Kent his heritage - as his name suggests - was Welsh, with his father originating from Flintshire. Jones studied at the Camberwell Art School in the years immediately prior to the Great War, and in 1915 enlisted with the Welch Fusiliers. Wounded on the Somme in July 1916, he finally escaped the front line in February 1918 when he came down with trench fever. Following the war he converted to Roman Catholicism, and joined Eric Gill's community of artists at Ditchling, in East Sussex, and then a Capel-y-ffin, in the Black Mountains.

Jones's oeuvre includes watercolours, wood engraving, letter work and poetry. He was poor; he struggled; he read and wrote; though engaged for a while to one of Gill's daughters, he never married; he suffered breakdowns; he made great art, and he won some of the recognition he deserved: in 1928 Ben Nicholson invited him to join the Seven & Five Society, and he exhibited alongside Henry Moore, John Piper, Kit Wood and Barbara Hepworth. In 1955 he was appointed CBE, and he lived on till 1974.

Pallant House's wonderful exhibition showcases Jones' work from a very early, magnificent drawing of a lion, made aged only seven, through to the late mythical masterworks, such as this one:

David Jones, Tristan and Isolde.

No reproduction on the web can do it justice - this is the sort of picture you want to be able to take home with you, to explore in all its infinite intricacies. Only a visit in the flesh will do, to an exhibition that really brings to life one of the less recognised greats of modern British art. I really love what Pallant House is achieving with its programme of exhibitions. (A great cafe there, too - and wonderfully helpful arts educators. If only they could move it all to Oxford, please?)

Oh, and I should add they're also showing a number of rediscovered works by Evelyn Dunbar. Everyone I've met who's been to Pallant House seems to have preferred one over the other; I'm no exception: Dunbar didn't move me at all, I'm afraid. I have always rather liked the Neo-Romanticism of A Land Girl and the Bail Bull at Tate Britain, but that was all I'd ever seen (or at least remembered); nothing else I saw lived up to that little (or should I say large) little masterpiece. It was all just a little too brown for my liking.

Evelyn Dunbar, A Land Girl and the Bail Bull (1945), Tate