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Hugh Bolton Jones

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Gallery Database:

 

Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927). "A Clear Stream," oil

on canvas, 16 x 26, signed. Registered for catalogue raisonee inclusion.  

BOLTON JONES LANDSCAPES ARE
A TRIUMPH!

Curator's Comment: 

Born in Baltimore, Jones began his formal studies at the Maryland Institute under the portrait painter David Acheson Woodward and later with Horace W. Robbins, who had just returned from a year of travel with Frederic Edwin Church. So it should be no surprise that Jones came to study with Church, who is the chief influence on his work. You can see it in the light, which picks up Church's magnificent tonality. In 1876, Jones and his younger brother Francis Coates Jones began a four-year sojourn in Europe, where Jones completed some study at the Academy Julien.  He joined the artist colony on the North coast of France in Pont-Aven, Brittany, which would later become an American center under the Harrisons. Upon his return to the United States, Jones settled in New York but purchased a summer cottage in South Egremont, Massachusetts, where he painted the Berkshires. Hudson River School influence, from Church, is seen in the rendering of brilliant midday light and formalist attention to exact natural details of the plein air scene.  Jones' artistic intent was set on capturing the spectacle of a pictorial landscape as it varied across the seasonal spectrum. His scenery conveys its value through features brought into focus with exquisite detail and radiant tonality, here seen in the suffused pink that raises earthen browns and sharpens verdant greens as in his wonderful skunk cabbage.

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Bolton-Jones

"The Meadow Brook"  brought $57,600

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Fishing the Stream brought  $36,000

Jones' works were widely exhibited in the United States at the turn of the century, and their powerful gemlike focus on nature in the perfected moment continues to bring high prices today. He was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1881 and to the National Academy of Design (where he had exhibited in the 1860s and continued to do so for a record sixty years) in 1883.  He was also a member of the American Water Color Society, the National Institute of Arts & Letters and the National Arts Club.  He won medals for the paintings he submitted to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; and at the 1889 and 1900 Paris Expositions. His paintings are  in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian. The artist died in 1927 in New York City.

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