Mysterious girl
Mysteries bloom like the flowers in David Jones’s The Garden Enclosed. The couple are the poet-painter and his fiance Petra, the 17-year-old daughter of his mentor, the sculptor and craft fanatic Eric Gill. Is she pushing him away or feeling his heartbeat? Does his flushed face and her pale cheek speak of unmatched passion?
Bird watching
They occupy a little corner of the garden, where the skewed perspective creates the dreamlike quality of medieval art. The geese, sacred to Juno, goddess of marriage, have phallic necks. Like the tree limbs, they suggest an insistent libidinal energy.
Dig deep
It’s far from a joyful painting: in fact, the garden has a traumatised quality. Years later, Jones, a war artist, wrote of how the trenches could “get into” an English back garden.
Dark Shadows
What of the doll – perhaps the one Petra’s father carved for her – abandoned on the ground? Does it represent childhood? Hindsight lends it a darker aspect. Jones likely didn’t know, but as a 1989 biography shockingly revealed, Petra, raised in a radical back-to-nature arts and crafts community, had been sexually abused by her father.
Included in Sussex Modernism, Two Temple Place, WC2, to Sunday 23 April
