Nell Choate Jones painted in a style that, while not abstract, eschews detail for form while emphasizing mass, movement, and contour. In picture after picture, it is the sway of a back, the bend in an elbow, or the carriage of a head held high that gives her figures character and charges them with life. Jones was born in Hawkinsville, Georgia in 1879, the daughter of James Choate, a captain in the Confederate army, and Cornelia Roquemore. When her father died in 1884, the family moved to New York and Nell attended Adelphi Academy in the fashionable Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. For many years, she taught elementary school. It was only in the 1920s that she took up painting, largely at the encouragement of her husband, Eugene A. Jones, a painter and etcher.
Nell Jones studied with Fred J. Boston, John F. Carlson, and Auguste Garguet at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France. In a 1927 joint show with her husband at the Holt Gallery in New York, she showed the fruits of her year at Fontainebleau; the show also included scenes of Woodstock and Old Lyme, artist colonies which she and her husband frequented. On a visit to Georgia in 1936, Jones was impressed by the region's red clay and lush green foliage, as well as the colorful and seemingly simpler life of rural African Americans. She began to adopt these as subjects for her brush, prompting regular visits to the South. The resulting works were often exhibited with the Southern States Art League.
Highly respected in her profession, Nell Choate Jones was elected president of the Brooklyn Society of Artists in 1949, becoming the first woman to head the organization. While still in that office, she was asked to lead the National Association of Women Artists. Founded in a studio on Washington Square in 1889 with only five members, the NAWA numbered eight hundred members when Jones was became president in 1951. Active into her final years, Nell Choate Jones died in Brooklyn at the age of 101, having attended the opening of her final show only the year before.
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This essay is copyrighted by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc.
For more information on this artist and work, please contact us.
This essay is copyrighted by Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc. and may not be reproduced or transmitted without written permission.