WPA Art Inventory Project

Along with John Goodwin McManus, Albertus Eugene Jones was one of the most influential artists and art teachers in Connecticut’s history. There are interesting similarities in their birth and death dates. Both were born in 1882. Jones died in 1957, and McManus passed away only a year later. In 1882 Albertus Jones was born in South Windsor, Connecticut. He attended grammar and high schools there and then attended and graduated from the Morse Business College. While at Morse in 1900, he discovered that he liked to draw and paint. He enrolled in classes offered by the Connecticut League of Art Students and took courses from Charles Noel Flagg, at that time the leader among Connecticut artists.

Jones was a well known and esteemed art teacher. For about twenty years, he taught drawing and painting at the Hartford Art School and in several places around Connecticut such as the South Windsor public schools. He continued teaching well into his later years, retiring from the South Windsor public schools in 1952. He believed that “his most important contribution” to art was “training other artists.” In 2006 a former student wrote that she had “learned a lot from this artist.”  “He was/is an inspiration.” She wrote that she took lessons from Jones in the seventh and eighth grades, most likely in South Windsor, and that “he is the cause of my being interested in landscapes and art in general.”

Jones was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Salmagundi Club, and the New Haven Paint and Clay Club. He exhibited widely and won several prizes between 1912 and 1945. He was known as a landscape painter, painting in oils and watercolor in the style of American impressionists prior to 1940. The WPA biography for Jones contained the following description:

“His paintings have a quality of austerity. He takes particular pains to make his landscapes vital and natural. His skies are always incorporated into the pattern and are not simply background. Withal he invariably expresses the strength and restraint of the New England landscape and its architecture.”

Jones joined the WPA Federal Arts Project in 1936 and produced approximately 111 easel works through 1941. His works were allocated throughout the state. He was one of nine Connecticut artists to have one of his paintings exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1940. Jones died in 1957 and is buried in the Central Cemetery of South Windsor.

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; WPA Biography; AskART;Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters (1986), pp. 461-462; “South Windsor-Albertus E. Jones To Leave Schools As Art Director,”Hartford Courant, June 1, 1952; “A. E. Jones Art Teacher Dies at 74,”Hartford Courant, March 3, 1957.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Albertus Jones:

Rebecca Field Jones was born Rebecca Field in Montague, Massachusetts on March 13, 1905. She graduated from Turner Falls High School in 1923 and attended Massachusetts State College for one year. She then spent a year or more studying in a private studio in Munich, Germany. In 1933 Jones co-founded the West Hartford Art League and Art Center where she later taught. She worked for the Public Works of Art Project and then for the WPA Federal Arts Project from its inception in 1935 until 1938. She created 39 works in a variety of media including oils, watercolors, wood, plaster, wire, and wax. She also prepared exhibits for the Children’s Museum in Hartford. In 1938 Jones left the WPA to join the PWA drafting department. That same year she was elected president of the Arts and Crafts Club of Hartford. In 1941 she wed Frederic Edward Jones, a well known sculptor from Farmington. Later in that same year she joined the staff of Oxford School as an instructor in graphic arts and crafts, as well as history and art. Around this same period she was a committee member of the Hartford Society of Women Painters. She eventually taught sculpture at Miss Porter’s school until 1968. Jones died in Windsor, Vermont on April 16, 2002, at the age of 97.

Sources: WPA Artist’s Work Card; WPA Biography; “West Hartford Art League Celebrates 40^th Anniversary, Hartford Courant, April 7, 1974; Obituary,Hartford Courant, April 21, 2002.

Images available in Flickr

Works of Art Listed in CT Archives’ database from Rebecca Jones: