David Jones was born in 1895 and trained as an artist under A. S. Hartrick in London. During the First World War he served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France, a seminal experience that influenced his paintings, poetry and prose. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1921 and began his close association with Eric Gill, as well as learning wood-engraving in the same year. His series of illustrations to The Chester Play of the Deluge (1927) is among the greatest wood-engravings by any British artist. In 1928 he joined the Seven and Five Society, exhibiting with Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, and others. His major book-length poem In Parenthesis (1937) was widely praised as among the greatest literary works in English to come out of the First World War. Jones's later years were dogged with ill-health, but this did not prevent him from producing major works of poetry, the book-length The Anathemata (1952), a volume of essays, Epoch and Artist (1959), several multi-media drawings associated with his deeply held Catholic faith, Roman history and Arthurian legend, as well as a magnificent series of colored inscriptions, unique in lettering history. He was made a Companion of Honor in the year of his death, 1974.

His article, "Art and Sacrament," can be found in Every Man an Artist .