Amy Jones (1899-1968)

Born in Buffalo, New York, Amy Jones was a practitioner of several creative endeavors, including painting, lithography, graphic design and illustration. She attended the Pratt Institute in New York City and studied privately with Xavier Gonzales, Cecil Chichester and Henry Hensche, among other instructors, and became a member of and exhibited regularly with the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, the National Association of Women Artists, the American Watercolor Club and the Silvermine Guild in Connecticut, and was a founder of the Saranac Lake Artists League where she and her husband moved in 1930. While in Saranac Lake, Jones began working with the Fine Arts Section of the Works Progress Administration and painted murals in upstate post offices, notably Painted Post, New York’s “Recording the Victory,” a scene featuring Revolutionary War soldiers captured by Native Americans completed in 1939, and Scotia, New York’s “The Glens Spared by French and Indians,” a depiction of a colonial family’s encounter with French and Native American forces during the Schenectady Indian Massacre, painted in 1941. The focus of the WPA’s Fine Arts Section was to bring art to the masses reflecting a local connection and these were historical references with which upstate New York residents could identify.

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As an illustrator, Amy Jones worked with Women’s Day magazine, Standard Oil Company, and Random House publishers, and was a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York. She exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally, including several annuals of the Pennsylvania Academy and the National Academy, the New Haven Paint and Clay Club, the Brighton Museum Invitational in England (1959) and the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolor Invitational in London in 1960. She was awarded several prizes over the years at these shows and in 1963 a retrospective exhibition of Jones’ work was presented at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art.

In addition to the Painted Post and Scotia, New York, post office murals, Jones’ work can currently be found at the Winsted, Connecticut, post office and in several museum collections, including the Chrysler Museum of Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art and in the collection of the United States Air Force.

References: Falk, Who Was Who in American Art, 1999; Historic Saranac Lake online archive