ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s David Jones became a member of the community of Catholic
artists and craftsman grouped around Eric Gill in Ditchling, Sussex. Jones had
been through the experience of war that was to be so memorably recreated in In Parenthesis, had returned to art school for a time, and had entered the Catholic Church. As both Gill and Jones have recounted, an important intellectual
influence in the Ditchling community was a short book by the Catholic
philosopher Jacques Maritain, published in France in 1920 as Art et Scolastique and translated into English as The Philosophy of Art. It was printed in a limited
edition of 500 copies by the St Dominic's Press at Ditchling in 1923. The translator was Fr John O'Connor, a close friend of Gill's; he is best remembered now as the supposed original of G.K. Chesterton's priest-
detective, Father Brown. Gill observes in his Autobiography:
The second English translation, made by J.F. Scanlan from a revised and expanded version of the French original, appeared in 1930 as Art and
Scholasticism, and has been reprinted from time to time. Fr O'Connor's version
reads more elegantly in places, but it is a rare book and I have used Scanlan's in this paper.
