Francis Coates Jones (American 1857-1932)

Meditation
oil on lined canvas, signed lower left "Francis C. Jones"
Provenance:
Berry-Hill Galleries, New York
Estate of Roy Hofheinz, Houston, TX
Simpson's Auctions, Houston, TX, September 11, 2005, lot 300 Spanierman Gallery, New York
Property from the Collection of Ambassador and Mrs. Alfred Hoffman, North Palm Beach
Size: 20 x 14 in (with frame 28 x 22 in)
J20077

SOLD

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Francis Coates Jones is known as a classic realist, a skilled figurative and mural painter trained in the French academic tradition. Influenced by Impressionism, Jones reflected contemporary scenes although his interest in costumes and decorative objects was always apparent. His delicately painted figures are set in opulent settings and interiors decorated with elaborate furniture and accessories.

The son of a successful businessman, Francis Coates Jones was born in Baltimore in 1857 where he attended a Quaker school. His elder brother, Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927) was a landscape painter, but it was not until travelling and visiting the artist Edwin Austin Abbey in London with his brother in 1876 that Francis first became interested in art. He spent a year with Hugh at the American artists’ colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany with artists including Thomas Hovenden and Robert Wylie.

In 1877 Jones left Pont-Aven for Paris, where he taught himself drawing and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in an antique class under Henri Lehmann. In 1878 the brothers Francis and Hugh travelled to Spain and Morocco, meeting their parents and making a tour of Europe. Francis remained abroad for five years, making sketching tours of Spain, Morocco, Italy, Switzerland and France. The winter of 1879 he worked on a military panorama in London, after which he returned to France and continued his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under the direction of William Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

After ten years in France, Francis Coates Jones returned to the United States in 1881 where he worked in his brother’s New York studio. After another visit to France, he settled permanently in New York in 1884 and taught at the National Academy of Design. He worked as an illustrator making views of historic houses, and as a mural painter spending summers painting in the Berkshire Mountains of South Egremont, Massachusetts. He continued his interest in exquisite decorative objects by designing furnishings for the studio-apartment he shared in the Sherwood Studio Building with Hugh. In the 1890’s Francis began painting with pastel and specialized in decorative groupings of the female model engaged in domestic tasks or at leisure.

Francis Coates Jones exhibited widely, including the National Academy of Design (1877-1933), American Federation of Artists 1877-85, Boston 1887-1909, Brooklyn Art Academy 1877-85, Pan-Am Expo Buffalo 1901, St. Louis Expo 1904, Corcoran Gallery 1908-14 (4 times), Pan-Pacific Expo, and San Francisco 1915.  Jones was a member of the American Federation of Artists, American Watercolour Society, National Academy of Design, National Arts Club, National Institute of Arts and Letters, National Society of Mural Painters, Salamagundi Club, and the Society of American Artists. He won several awards including the NAD Clarke prize for best figure painting in 1885, the Saint Louis Exposition, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and the Isidor medal for figure painting in 1913. His work can be found in institutions across the United States including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wichita Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jones was particularly active with the National Academy, serving as the institution’s treasurer for twenty-two years and administering its Henry Ward Ranger Fund which purchased contemporary American art for donation to Museums. He was a valued advisor to many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he served as a Trustee from 1917-1930. He never married and in 1907 moved to an expensively furnished home at 33 West Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan where he lived with his brother Hugh and invalid sister Louise. In 1929 Francis suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed and he died in 1932.