HENRY BOZEMAN JONES (1889 - 1973) Untitled (Romantic Head).
Oil on masonite board, circa 1940-50. 610x508 mm; 24x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private Florida collection.
This painting is an unusual modern example by this Philadelphia artist whose long career spanned from the Harlem Renaissance to the postwar period. He studied at the School of Pedagogy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1908-1910. Jones earned a living as a children's book illustrator, but was also a printmaker and painter contemporary with Allan Freelon, and exhibited his work in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions of 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1933. According to Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, his work changed from an academic style to a more colorful, modern period in 1937 after a sketching trip to North Carolina and the Bahamas. His later works were often of romantic and mystical themes, like the 1947 linoleum cut, Dance of the Rib, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is only the second painting of his to come to auction that is not a landscape--in a similar palette and abstract, his undated Jazz Quartet sold at Sotheby's, New York on September 13, 2006.
