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Nell Choate Jones

Nell Choate Jones painted in a style that, while not abstract, eschews detail for form while it emphasizes 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. Her grandfather Choate was an architect "who built lovely things in Milledgeville. . . beautiful gateways and other artistic designs," according to an undated newspaper clipping. When her father died in 1884, the family moved to New York, where Nell lived to be 101 years old. She attended Adelphi Academy in the fashionable Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. For many years she taught kindergarten and elementary school. It was only in the 1920s that, encouraged by her husband, Eugene A. Jones, a painter and etcher, she took up painting. She studied with Fred J. Boston and John F. Carlson and with Auguste Garguet at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France. In a joint show with Eugene in 1927 at the Holt Gallery on Lexington Avenue she showed the fruits of her year at Fontainebleau as well as scenes of Woodstock and Old Lyme, artists colonies which she and her husband frequented.

On a visit to Georgia in 1936 to attend her sister's funeral, Nell Jones was impressed by the red Georgia clay, the lush green foliage, and the colorful and seemingly simpler life of the state's rural Afro-Americans as subjects for her canvases. She began with this trip to visit the South regularly. The work which resulted was often exhibited with the Southern States Art League and found its way into important southern museum collections such as Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Fort Worth Art Museum.

Highly respected in her profession, Nell was elected President of the Brooklyn Society of Artists in 1949, becoming the first woman to head that organization in its thirty-four year history. While still in that office she was asked to head the National Association of Women Artists. The NAWA, founded in a studio on Washington Square in 1889 with only five members, numbered eight hundred when Nell was elected President in 1951. As a participant in this group she was invited to display her work nationally and internationally, including at the New York World's Fair of 1940 and in the American Gallery of Athens, Greece in 1957. At the age of ninety-six Nell was chosen as the NAWA's Woman of the Year.

Nell Jones was an active woman into her final years. The Director of the Marbella Gallery in New York, the last gallery to give her a show, which was mounted in 1979, recalled her bravely ascending a flight of stairs to see the installation. She was chatty that day in her one-hundredth year, full of questions and information about the many artists she had known over her long, distinguished career. Nell Jones died in Brooklyn just two years later.
CS

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston

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