Biography

Robert Mead Jones has been painting impressionist and realist landscapes, still lifes and portraits for over thirty years. His paintings are prepared in oil on linen or cotton canvas. Having studied and worked in Europe for a number of years, he is fluent in French and Italian, and returns to Europe frequently to paint.

Robert Mead Jones

Jones’s formal training includes studies at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Paintings by Jones hang in The National Constitution Center, The Philadelphia Club, The Buffalo Club (Buffalo, N.Y.), The Independence Seaport Museum, the Merion Cricket Club, The United States Federal Courts and a large number of other corporate and private venues. Commissions include portraits of the former head of BBC Radio and his wife, Governor Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, John C. Bogle, founder and former Chair of The Vanguard Group, members of European nobility, a former member of British Parliament and many (very charming) children.

Jones’s work has appeared in various juried art exhibitions, including The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Alumni Exhibition. He has won a number of prizes for his work, including “best in show.” His paintings have been advertised in The Collector’s Guide (Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque), Philadelphia Magazine, Vero Beach Magazine, and Main Line Today, and he has been featured, along with his wife (fellow artist Bonnie Beauchamp Jones) in articles in Philadelphia Magazine, Vero Beach 32963 and The Wayne and Suburban Times.  Portraits by Jones have been mentioned in a British novel and displayed in a feature article in The New York Times.

Jones sells his work through direct sales and through leading art shows and galleries, including Philadelphia’s oldest and largest gallery. Jones’s paintings reside in public and private collections in the United States and abroad.

Like Matisse before him, Jones is a lawyer. Before retiring early to pursue art full-time, Jones headed the International Corporate Practice at one of America’s leading law firms, overseeing mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and public offerings of securities. He graduated with honors from Yale University and The University of Pennsylvania Law School. He studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Paris Law School, and worked as a bilingual guide in Paris and the Loire Valley. He holds a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and the rank of Captain in the United States Army Reserves (retired). He has been listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Society. A former National Preparatory School Wrestling Champion, and a Ranking Scholar at Yale, Jones brings to his art the same intensity and intellectual curiosity that he has devoted to other areas of endeavor.

Jones believes that each painting should be approached on its own merits, reflecting the style that suits it best. His realist paintings and portraits are classically rendered– built up with thin layers of paint and glaze. His impressionist paintings are a rich impasto, designed to capture not only mere objects, but also the atmosphere that surrounds those objects and the fractured light that infuses them. In portraiture, his aim is to depict the character as well as the likeness of the subject. In all of his art, he believes that the test is not whether a painting is “interesting” or “provocative,” but whether it is, and remains, a source of constant joy.