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This view from a window represents the walled garden at Pigott's near High Wycombe, the farm where the artist and typographer Eric Gill had moved his household in 1928. David Jones was a regular visitor to Pigott's in the 1930s and became part of Gill's inner circle. At this time Jones wrote: ‘I always work from the window of a house if at all possible. I like looking out on the world from a reasonably sheltered position. I can’t paint in the wind and I like the indoors-outdoors, contained yet limitless feeling of windows and doors…The rambling, familiar, south, walled, small, flower-beddedness of Pigotts…did something.’ A deeply Catholic artist, Jones inflected his representations of the natural world with strong theological significance. In Walled Garden he evokes the idea of the Virgin Mary as a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden in which the Eternal Word was nurtured and given flesh. Here the exuberance of the garden at Pigott's echoes the opening words of Mary's great Magnificat spoken to her cousin Elizabeth at the Visitation: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.’ (Luke 1: 46-47).

Gallery label for Connections (Yale Center for British Art, 2011-05-26 - 2011-09-11)