Artist and restorer, son of a cigar merchant, who was educated at St Paul’s School and St John’s Wood Art School, where he started a lifelong friendship with the painter John Armstrong (Jonas’ portrait of Armstrong is in the National Portrait Gallery). To avoid an ostentatious life-style Jonas left home and set up as a painter, notably of portraits, with some landscapes and religious pictures. He had a number of patrons, and his subjects included his friend the writer John Davenport, film actress Elsa Lanchester, cricketer Percy Fender and Lady Iris Mountbatten. Jonas 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.
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After sharing a studio with Armstrong, Jonas occupied one in Maple Street, Fitzrovia, a ramshackle affair where Leigh Hunt had entertained Thackeray and Dickens. During World War II Jonas served in the Home Guard. He was an old-fashioned bachelor bohemian, a member of the Fitzrovia group, who appears in Clifford Bax’s memoir Rosemary for Remembrance; 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 Myddleton Square studio (he had to be rehoused there when the Post Office Tower dislodged his old studio). Jonas’ style was traditional and he was not prolific. His only solo show was at the Matthieson Gallery, 1939, which he said was killed by the outbreak of World War II.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
