Artists

Hugh Bolton Jones

1848-1927
American
Biography:

Hugh Bolton Jones was an award-winning landscape artist whose paintings of pastoral scenes were widely exhibited and collected in the United States.

Born in Baltimore to a well-respected family, Jones attended drawing classes at the Maryland Institute, studying under David Acheson Woodward and in 1865, studied under Horace W. Robbins in New York City.

From 1865 to 1876, Jones painted many landscapes of well-known scenes of the Eastern United States, from his native Maryland and West Virginia north to the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts where he ultimately purchased a summer cottage. In style and subject matter, his paintings of this period tend to reflect the dominant influence of the Hudson River School.

In 1876, Jones traveled to Europe with his younger brother, eventually joining former Baltimore acquaintance Thomas Hovenden in the artists’ colony at Pont Aven, Brittany. Here he painted his first mature plein-air works. While in Europe, Jones exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Paris Exposition of 1878, and at the Royal Academy, London.

Upon his return to the United States in 1880, he settled in New York but purchased a summer cottage in South Egremont in the Berkshires freeing him to paint en-plein-air as he had in Pont Aven. He was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1881 and to the National Academy of Design in 1883. He was also a member of the American Water Color Society, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Arts Club. He won medals for the paintings he submitted to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; at the 1889 and 1900 Paris Expositions; at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.

He continued to paint until his death in 1927, in New York City.

Selected Collections:
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Brooklyn Museum
  • Museum of Fine Art, Boston
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum
  • Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
  • Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • Corcoran Gallery of Art