He is also remembered as one of The Kardomah Gang, an informal group of young artists in Swansea that included the poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, and the composer Daniel Jones.

[1][2] Alfred George Janes was born on 30 June 1911, in the city centre of Swansea, South Wales, above his parents' fruit and flower shop in Castle Square.

[2] While in London, he shared several flats in and around Chelsea with contemporaries; at first with William Scott, the Scots-Irish artist whom Janes met at the Royal Academy Schools.

[1][2][4] In 1932 Janes became part of a group of bohemian Swansea friends that included poets Dylan Thomas, Charles Fisher, John Prichard and Vernon Watkins, composer Daniel Jones, artist Mervyn Levy and "Marxist scholar" Bert Trick.

[4][8] The Café stood opposite the offices of the South Wales Daily Post, to which Fisher and Thomas were apprenticed in 1930, after they had left school.

[8][10] In a radio broadcast in the early 1950s Dylan Thomas described how they shared rooms while Janes was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts, described Janes's meticulous technique and stated that, "After many Academy awards, and several paintings hung in London galleries, he returned to Swansea to work and experiment, which were synonymous.

[10] When Janes decided in 1936 to return to Swansea, he left his accumulated works behind and most are now lost; but the portrait of Dylan Thomas and some other paintings and drawings had been acquired by Cedric Morris and Augustus John, to form part of an exhibition of Welsh artists held in Cardiff,[2] and the portrait was purchased in 1935 by the National Museum Cardiff.

Janes's last portrait of Thomas is pen and ink on paper, drawn around 1964, a decade after the poet's death; it forms part of the permanent collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.