Eric Gill and David Jones at Capel-y-Ffin: Try the Wilderness First

This is the first book dedicated to the four year collaboration between two major British artists, Eric Gill and David Jones, at Gill’s artistic-religious community at Capel-y-Ffin, a remote disused monastery in the Black Mountains. There, during the nineteen twenties, Gill and Jones came under new influences and took new directions which led to some of their most outstanding work. Capel-y-Ffin had a profound religious influence on them too. It allowed Gill to develop his thinking on medieval Catholicism, and generally to carry out his alternative lifestyle. Jones’ more orthodox faith was further strenghtened, and proved an important source of inspiration for perhaps the leading British poet-painter since Blake. Jonathan Miles’ original study demonstrates powerfully the way locality can impinge on artistic sensibility, and how art and religion meet. His extensive research gives valuable insights in to the lives and work of these two great artists.