JEAN JONES : A LIFE UNCOVERED

Jean Jones: A Life Uncovered

8th – 29th May 2021

Jean Jones was a British figurative painter who achieved substantial success in the London and Oxford art worlds of the 1970s, culminating in a prestigious solo exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 1980. Her work engages varyingly with the legacies of expressionism and post-impressionism, serving as a “personal diary” through which she was able to document her shifting perceptions of the world across five decades. The notable dealer and connoisseur David Carritt commended the “poetic” and “lyrical” qualities of her paintings, whilst the novelist Iris Murdoch went so far as to predict that Jones would one day be as famous as her great idol, Van Gogh. As it would happen however, Jones would never reach the great heights she had once promised; her career as a selling and exhibiting artist tragically curtailed by the deterioration of her long-standing struggle with severe mental illness. It was painting – practised as a daily ritual – that ultimately saved her.

'Jean Jones: A Life Uncovered' will delve deeper into the complex story of the woman behind the canvas; illuminating the trials and tribulations of her personal life, whilst situating her within the history of post-war British painting. Alongside a characteristic selection of Jones’s breath-taking Dartmoor landscapes and touching portraits of her loved ones, this exhibition will display newly unearthed archival material, including sketches, hand-drawn children’s books, photographs and letters. With an array of previously unseen paintings, together with a presentation by curator Michael Kurtz, Jones’s story will be presented in rich detail – a story which so nearly eluded the scope of history.

The following collections hold Jean Jones paintings: Corpus Christi College JCR, Oxford, Girton College, Cambridge, Estate of JRR Tolkien, The Golding Family Archive, Estate of Iris Murdoch, Professor John Carey, Estate of Lady Wendy French, Paintings in Hospitals Charity (chosen by Lord Jeremy Hutchinson), Estate of Lord Anthony Quinton.

Exhibition Launch

Saturday 8^th May, 11am

Curator’s Talk : Jean Jones and the Love of Painting by Michael Kurtz

Wednesday 19^th May, 7pm

‘spent ½ of this morning sitting in front of the motif waiting for the sky to blow clear, which it didn’t, but it has made for my favourite sort of afternoon here. Huge slow clouds from the south. Mostly sunny & clear pinkish blue to the southern horizon (towards the sea where I spent August in 1934 – my first visit to Devonshire & my first long lasting sense of loss (well it lasted all of five minutes as the hired car carried us away from Warren Cottage, built in the [?] 80s by Lord Revelstoke with money from Plymouth Breakwater – as a shooting lodge – now owned by the National Trust, not for its own beauty but for its setting which is on the best cliffs I know (different but no finer than the place we walked to the south of Deal that fine April day when there was a sea mist & a very Turneresque sail yellowish in it.

From Warren my bro’ & I could just see, looking north, the China Clay mounds. Now I see them back to front & live in the Looking Glass as it were. This has something to do with painting (like the back of ones head) but I’m too idle to make sense of it.’

– Excerpt from a letter Jean Jones sent to David Carritt about her childhood experience of Devon