Biography
Harry Maude Jonas (b. London 1893 - d. 1990) studied St John’s Wood Art School, where he started a lifelong friendship with the painter John Armstrong and with whom he initially shared a studio. He was primarily a portrait painter; his subjects included John Armstrong,t he writer John Davenport, film actress Elsa Lanchester, cricketer Percy Fender and Lady Iris Mountbatten.
Jonas had also acted for the silent screen, playing The Boy in Love, Life and Laughter, with Betty Balfour (1923), and working as art director on Reveille (1924), both directed by George Pearson. He was an old-fashioned bachelor bohemian and a member of the Fitzrovia group, occupied a studio at 35 Maple Street, Fitzrovia, London on the site of the Post Office Tower (now BT Tower). He appears in Clifford Bax’s memoir Rosemary for Remembrance. He was a devout Roman Catholic; a lover of talk, mysteries and the predictions of Nostradamus; and a discoverer of pictures, including one by Holbein, an alleged portrait of William Shakespeare and what he claimed was a self-portrait by John Constable, which for years he worked to restore in his Myddelton Square studio. His only solo show was at the Matthieson Gallery (1939).
