Hugh Bolton Jones Biography | Oil Paintings

Hugh Bolton Jones came from a wealthy family and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore under the portrait painter David Acheson Woodward.

Between 1865 and 1876 Hugh Bolton Jones spent a large part of his time in New York City while retaining Baltimore as his home. For a few months he studied with Horace Wolcott Robbins and met his friend Frederic Edwin Church, Church had a major influence on his style. But Robbins and Church left on a painting trip to Jamaica, so his study ended. Jones began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in 1867. He became a good friend of the artist Thomas Hovenden in New York and, in 1868 Jones and Hovenden set up an art studio in Baltimore which they shared.

In 1870, Jones spent the summer months in Europe, sketching and painting on his return he exhibited oil paintings he had done in England and Ireland at the 1871 Baltimore Artists Show. He spent the summer of 1873 traveling by railway making various stops in Maryland and Virginia to sketch for future works one of them being his 1874 oil painting Summer in the Blue Ridge, shown at the National Academy of Design and highly praised.

In 1876 Hugh Bolton Jones and his younger brother Francis Coates Jones sailed to Europe for what would be a four-year excursion to travel and paint in through Europe. In Pont-Aven they lived at the Gloanec Pension, where Paul Eugene-Henri Gauguin would stay ten years later before his trip to Tahiti. Jones also took sketching trips to Spain, England, Italy, and Morocco. He exhibited his works both in London and at the Paris Salon and the Exposition Universelle in 1878.

With all the travel Hugh Bolton Jones did his best-known oil paintings are of New England and New Jersey and although he never took classes with Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School, he had a big influence on his handling of light and the precision of his en plein air depictions of nature.

Art Movement: Hudson River School.
Artists Influencing Hugh Bolton Jones: David Woodward, Frederic Edwin Church, Horace Robbins.
He Traveled To France, England, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Morocco.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.