This is the first biography, fully illustrated, of Ray Howard-Jones (1903-1996), the renowned Welsh woman war artist, sea painter, mosaicist, community theatre pioneer, poet and Christian mystic. Her outstanding achievements were made despite life-threatening illness and innumerable accidents. The book features over 200 of Howard-Jones's illustrated works.

‘Having known Ray Howard-Jones in the late 1980s and early 1990s, her last decade, I realised that hers was a remarkable, vivid and unconventional personality. Since then, working in Welsh museums and galleries, I came to appreciate what an exceptional artist she was and felt compelled to find out more about her life and work. Yet, she has been incredibly neglected in recent decades. Researching, writing and selecting images for this biography has taken many years but I wanted, through its pages, to bring her to life and to enable people to reassess her many achievements. How is it that a pioneer of community arts, a celebrated mosaicist, an artist represented by one of the largest collections of artworks in Amgueddfa Cymru and one of the most successful Second World War artists from Wales is so little known today?’

David Moore

David Moore has worked extensively in Welsh museums and galleries and writes about Welsh modern art and public art collections. He met Ray while working for Pembrokeshire Museums. In Brecon he established a reputation for exhibiting Welsh artists and developed a notable regional art collection.

David lives in Brecon, Wales. He has worked in public museums and galleries for twenty years, starting as a volunteer at the Ceredigion Museum. 

An Associate Member of the Museums Association, he worked for Pembrokeshire Museum Service and then as curator of Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery.

'I had never encountered anyone quite like Ray. About five and a half feet in height, this sprightly fair-haired woman in her mid-eighties with inquisitive blue eyes was feisty, focused, driven and unconventional. Engaging in conversation she was rarely reserved in expressing an opinion. She was totally convinced of her own worth and destiny.' David Moore

"David Moore has briskly sketched out a vivid and authoritative portrait of a remarkable artist and in so doing burnished Ray Howard-Jones’ reputation at a time when it was already starting to fade.

He has also judiciously selected a huge range of work to illustrate such a rich and hugely productive life, with many distinct phases including a late period when Ray underlined the centrality of Christianity in her life by studying to be an oblate of the Benedictine order after coming into contact with the monks of Nashdon Abbey in Buckinghamshire.

He tells us not only about the artist but the poet too, and informs us about an intriguing friendship between Ray and another artist-poet of distinction, namely David Jones.

The diligent work and wide-ranging research on Moore’s part has resulted in a book which is a veritable feast for the eye. It is so beautifully and intelligently designed, right down to the title pages."

Nation Cymru