Dartmoor’s forgotten painter
From our UK edition
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.
