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While Jonah Jones’s first essay in sculpture was a remarkably accomplished miniature nude female torso carved in olive wood in 1945, it was not until he had undergone training in stone carving at the Eric Gill workshop in 1950 that he felt ready to engage seriously with the medium. From 1952 on, whenever he had a gap in the flow of commissions, he would work on his own creative ideas. These would result in small-scale sculptures, often made with stones which he had found or were brought by friends.
Jonah produced at least 30 of these works during this period. In the earliest of these works, Classical roots are evident, as well as a certain debt to Eric Gill. Later in the decade the influence of the German Expressionist Ernst Barlach can be seen, with stylised, dramatic gestures. In many of the works the rich colour of the material is used to good effect. Often the sculptures of this decade are rough-hewn, with the claw marks of the chisel still visible. He referred to them later as “little primitive stone-carvings”: “they were quite outside art school work, they were simply me, on them I learned and soldiered.”