Leon Foster Jones
American (1871-1940)
Leon Foster Jones was born in Manchester, New Hampshire. He studied under Joseph Rodefer DeCamp and Ernest Lee Major at the Cowles Art School in Boston, then lived and worked in Concord for several years before settling in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York in 1910. In April 1914, Jones traveled to Europe to further his studies but had to abandon this effort at the outbreak of the first World War. He applied for an emergency visa in England and returned to the United States on a freight vessel in September. Jones was involved with the Federal Art Project under President Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA in the 1930s, and was an active figure in the Long Island art scene for decades, teaching at a preparatory school and assisting with community projects.
Paintings and etchings of historic places in Long Island comprise the majority of his oeuvre, though he also did illustrative work for the newspaper and magazine publisher Edward Munsey early in his career. Jones produced most of his commercial art in the winter season and devoted his summers to sketching en plein air. He showed work at the Salmagundi Club, the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Works by Leon Foster Jones can be seen in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Long Island Museum of Art.
