Hugh Bolton Jones Was an American landscape painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he began his art education at the Maryland Institute. He traveled and painted in Europe for four years, primarily in France, where he was introduced to the practice of plein air painting.
On his return, he shared a studio in New York with his brother, Francis Coates Jones, who was noted for his paintings of elegant figures in gardens and interiors.
Hugh Bolton Jones approached his early landscapes with a sharp, detailed realism that showed the influence of Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School of American painting. In his middle and later work his style became more painterly and poetic, showing the European influence of the Barbizon painters and the French Impressionists.
He often painted with controlled value ranges, particularly in his paintings of early spring meadows, in which the tree foliage consists of delicate whisps against the sky.
In the latter part of his career, critics dismissed him as “predictable” for his continued devotion to the scenes he loved of streams, woods and fields in New Jersey and Massachussetts. Some of those “predictable” landscapes are among my personal favorites in American painting.
