HENRY WANTON JONES: A Retrospective

As a student, Jimmy studied under Arthur Lismer and the first decade of his artistic career was spent painting abstraction, followed by another decade as a sculptor.  The artist John Ivor Smith, a long-time friend of Jimmy’s, described this period as consisting of “tough, welded steel pieces almost totally devoid of figurative reference, through a series of forged organic works to finally, a fierce blackened steel head which I have not seen for a quarter of a century, but remember vividly in every detail.”  Many of Jimmy’s sculptures from this period resurfaced in the 1992 exhibition La sculpture au Québec, 1946-1961 at the Musée du Quebec, including a number of pieces cast in fiberglass-reinforced resin.  These witty, sensuous figurative works, completed in the 1960s, are a precursor to the artist’s turn to figurative painting a few years later.

The first time I made the trip to Jimmy and his wife Julie’s home, I had such trouble finding it.  Tucked away among the hills of St. Sauveur, Quebec, a barely visible sign led me to a concealed dirt road at the end of which a farmhouse sat within a clearing overlooking a lovely stream and wooded backdrop.  Inside his studio on the upper floor of the house were many paintings in various stages of completion.  A strict perfectionist, Jimmy would often bat me off with a cry of “it’s not done yet!” whenever I circled a piece that I really liked.  I did manage to wrestle an armful of pieces from him on that first visit and was very excited to be representing such a unique and original talent.  Jimmy invited me to stay over that evening and we had a wonderful riverside chat over whisky, in which war-stories were swapped and the laughs flowed freely. 
 
An irreverent sense of humour is a hallmark of Jimmy’s work and particularly his self-portraits, which he completed at various stages throughout his life.  During one of my visits to Jimmy’s studio I found him quite upset because his Montreal dealer had called him to let him know that a client was very interested in one of his self-portraits but would only purchase it if Jimmy agreed to paint out a particular body part that featured prominently in the work.  Jimmy refused, arguing that if they didn’t know how to sell the painting as is, they should return it to him.  I asked him to show me the piece and I quite liked it and felt I could sell it.  I eventually offered it to what would have become the Portrait Gallery of Canada when they had put a call out for unusual and interesting portraits to be featured in their collection.  Unfortunately, they rejected the piece, reasoning that they “couldn’t sell the painting to the Canadian public” due to the nudity.  For the curious, I still have Self Portrait, 1988, and it can be viewed in this exhibition.

Jimmy could be quite difficult, particularly when it came time to mount a solo exhibition of his work.  He loathed to share framing or advertising costs and whenever he came into town, he would gripe about how much higher they charged for breakfast in Toronto than near his home in rural Quebec.  On one occasion, he opted to sleep in his van, which he parked behind my gallery, rather than pay Toronto’s exorbitant hotel prices.  When it came time to meet his public, however, Jimmy’s charisma and passion for his work took over – he loved listening to others discuss and interpret his mysterious paintings even though he often shied away from explaining what they meant.  Over the years, many tried unsuccessfully to get Jimmy to talk about the significance of his stable of recurring images – reclining nudes on stallions, riders posing in cowboy gear, spotted dogs sniffing at his wife Julie’s ear, violins in their cases, strewn next to bowls of cherries, masked strangers lurking in cemeteries dotted by a ubiquitous Mexican flag. We can only continue to speculate, but Jimmy did leave us a few clues.

We know that he was born on a farm in rural Quebec so he always knew and loved horses.  We also know that in 1956, when Jimmy began his annual tradition of living half the year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, he walked up a hill to a ranch one morning and noticed a woman doing exercises on the back of a horse with no saddle.  He became quite fascinated and found out later that she was a member of the Mexican Olympic Equestrian team.  He later admitted that it was this image of the woman on horseback that led to so many of his works featuring horses, not so much as vehicles for riding but to support the human figure in a multitude of different scenarios.  The endless possibilities of that one image sparked something inside him and he ran with it for years.  He would usually begin with a glimmer of something as simple as one or two horses and he’d expand on it, image by image.  Sometimes the painting would become too full and he’d let the images bleed into another painting.  He was always working on two or three at the same time.  One led to the next, like frames on a reel of film.

In 2017, the Museum of Fine Arts in Sherbrooke sponsored a retrospective devoted to Jones’ work called Démasque that was warmly received by the public – an indication that his unique, artistic voice is waiting to be more widely discovered and appreciated. In addition to private collections in North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, his works can be found in the permanent collections of Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ont.; The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ont.; Concordia University, Montréal; University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, N.B.; Thomas More Institute, Montréal; Loto-Quebec, Montréal; DuPont Canada Inc., Mississauga, Ont.; and The Bundy Modern, Waitsfield, Vermont.   —Phillip Gevik, October 2024