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photo by Hywel Harries
. Ray Howard-Jones
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"The Seal", 1950
gouache
c.56x72cm
"The Warden's House Skomer", 1953
gouache
c.56x72cm
"Song of the Rock", 1987
gouache
c.56x72cm(in private collections)
Ray Howard-Jones was born in 1903 in Lambourn/Berkshire of Welsh parents; she died in 1996 in Pembrokeshire. From 1920 to 1924 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1946 she attended the Patrick Allan-Fraser School of Art in Arbroath. Between 1949 and 1958 she spent long periods on the Island of Skomer off the South Wales coast. One of her main influences was James Cowie.
Ray Howard-Jones's career as an artist did not get off the ground until she was nearly 40. At first she undertook archaeological drawings for the National Museum of Wales. Then in the 1940s she was able to bulldoze her way into being one of the very few accredited women war artists. A collection of her work is in the Imperial War Museum. After 1945, she returned to Pembrokeshire, where she grew up. From then on, she spent much of her life there, alone or with the photographer Raymond Moore. When in the mid-1980s curator David Moore (click here), began to work in Pembrokeshire for the Dyfed Museum Service, he came to know Ray and became interested in her artwork. Together with Welsh Art, he has been researching her life and work ever since. Art historian Felicity Owen and David Moore hope, in the future, to arrange a major exhibition of Ray's paintings. They have tracked down important work by the artist, much of which is in private hands. They would be pleased to hear from anyone with work by - or information about - Ray Howard-Jones.
Please contact David Moore at: 75 Watton, Brecon, Powys, Wales, LD3 7EL or e-mail him on: davidmoore@suehileyharris.co.uk.
David Moore explaines: "Ray Howard-Jones was a significant Welsh landscape artist, a contemporary of Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Eric Ravilious. Long overdue for critical reassessment she was extremely prolific over a life of ninety-three years and has left a considerable legacy of work. Much of her best work is in private hands although she is represented in many public collections. While studying at the Slade School of Art in London, she was taught by Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Tancred Borenius. As a War Artist she recorded coastal fortifications and merchant shipping being prepared for D-Day.
Ray is best known for her remarkable use of colour in impressionistic and often deeply spiritual Pembrokeshire seascapes and coastal scenes. Many were painted on Skomer and around Marloes. She also sketched and painted the coastal wildlife. She had a strong sense of design and produced two outstanding mosaics, one on the newspaper office Thomson House in Cardiff and the other an altarpiece in Marchmont St Giles' Church in Edinburgh."
In her obituary in The Guardian in 1996 Roger Worsley wrote (excerpts): "Ray Howard-Jones, an artist of considerable but perhaps still under-appreciated talent, has died at the age of 93. She spent much of her long life struggling against what she experienced as the disadvantage of having been born a woman. She was a mass of contradictions, a very feminine woman who signed her work "Ray", partly to disguise her gender (her Christian name was actually Rosemary). She was convinced that her technical abilities as an artist, were as good as those of her male contemporaries. In the end, she had the satisfaction of seeing her work in public and private collections around the world. Her stays on Skomer showed her, that nature and her deep inner spiritual life, as well as Celtic mystery and legends, were sources of inspiration.
Commissions: 1958 mosaic for Thompson House, Cardiff; 1964-5 mosaic for Grange Church, Edinburgh.
International Links:
In later years she travelled extensively in Spain, Cyprus & America.
