Robert Mead Jones

Robert Mead Jones has been painting realist and impressionist landscapes, still life and portraits for over four decades. His paintings hang at The National Constitution Center, The Theodore Roosevelt National Historic Inauguration Site, The Philadelphia Club, the Merion Cricket Club, The Buffalo Club (Buffalo, NY), Quail Valley Golf Club (Vero Beach, FL), The Independence Seaport Museum (Philadelphia, PA), The United States Federal Courts, a number of universities, and other private and public venues throughout the United States and in England, France and Ireland. Jones’s portrait clients include members of European nobility, a former member of British Parliament, a Knight of the British Realm, the Governor of Pennsylvania, University Presidents, Presidents of Private Clubs, founders and captains of industry, and many private clients, including a number of very charming children.

Like Matisse before him, Jones is a lawyer. He graduated with honors from Yale University and The University of Pennsylvania Law School. 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 spent three years studying in Paris—as a high school student, as a college student and as a graduate student. In addition to a Juris Doctor degree in law, he holds a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds the rank of Captain in the United States Army Reserves (inactive). 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 landscape and still life painting, his goal is to create beauty. In portraiture, his aim is to capture the character as well as the likeness of the subject and to set the whole in a composition that is pleasing to the eye. 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.

Bonnie Beauchamp Jones

Bonnie Jones (who sells her paintings under the name Beauchamp Jones) has been painting landscapes and still life in oil since the early 1990s. Her interest in art dates back to 1965 when, as a junior in college in Paris, she took a course on art history at the Louvre in which students were instructed on the techniques of the old masters as they stood before the paintings in the Museum’s great halls. At the end of the academic year in 1966, Bonnie remained in Paris for the summer, perfecting her French and working at various jobs, including as a sales girl at a small perfume shop behind Notre Dame Cathedral. During the year in France, she was amused and charmed as the French struggled to pronounce her maiden name “Bushong.” On their Latin tongue, the name inevitably sounded like “Beauchamp,” a word meaning “beautiful field” in French. It was this delightful Gallic mispronunciation that later inspired Bonnie to incorporate Beauchamp into her artist’s signature.

In the years that followed, she graduated from Denison University in Ohio, and returned to France to pursue graduate studies at The University of Paris. In addition, she obtained a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from Temple University and a Juris Doctorate from Villanova Law School. She completed a successful 22-year career in the law, serving as Chief Counsel for one of America’s largest corporations. Her legal responsibilities took her frequently to London and other foreign capitals, and in 1998 she was listed in Euromoney Publication’s Guide to the World’s Leading Insurance and Reinsurance Lawyers. During her legal career, Beauchamp Jones pursued her early interest in art as a passionate avocation, finding time to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and at the Valdes Art School workshops in Santa Fe.

In 1999, Beauchamp Jones retired early from the practice of law, followed by her husband’s early retirement in 2000, allowing them to focus on their shared passion for painting. Bonnie’s approach to art has been to concentrate on quality rather than quantity, with the aim of making each painting a gem. Her goal in art is simple: To follow her own Muse, and thereby produce works of beauty that are an enduring pleasure to behold. Her love of art and her extensive travel throughout the world have resulted in highly prized paintings of a very personal style that often depict foreign landscapes and cityscapes and objects collected abroad.

At the Opera

ROBERT MEAD JONES | 30 x 24

Parallel Paths

By Robert Mead Jones

I first saw Bonnie in 1965. We were 20 years old – exchange students from different universities preparing to sail to France for our junior year at the Sorbonne. We were on the deck of the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth (QEI) in New York harbor. It was a splendid day in early September and for me it was love at first sight. Less than three years later, in 1968, we married. In passing through this world, we have chosen to follow parallel paths.

As undergraduate students, we both majored in French. We both completed undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne and graduate studies at the University of Paris. We both speak French and Italian and have both worked as bilingual guides in Paris and the Loire Valley. We both hold graduate degrees in anthropology and legal degrees as Juris Doctors. We each had a successful career as a Philadelphia lawyer.

For 25 years, I pursued painting as a hobby while practicing law. Near the end of that period, Bonnie took up painting, beginning as I had with small works in oil while she was still practicing law. Though we are largely self-taught, we have taken courses at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the emphasis was painting landscapes en plein air. In art classes, I learned that Cadmium Red Light mixed with a bit of white is a good starting color for the lower lip in a portrait, and that diagonal is a good shape for scudding clouds in landscape paintings. But artists of the quality of Monet in landscapes or Sargent in portraiture are more likely to be painting than teaching art classes. Therefore, I reached the conclusion early on that if one wants to paint like Monet or Sargent, one must pursue independent study, informed by trial and error, hours spent at museums perusing their paintings and reading about their tools and techniques.

In 1999, Bonnie retired early from the practice of law as Chief Counsel of the Reinsurance Law Department at CIGNA Corporation. The following year, I followed suit and retired early from my position as head of the international corporate practice at one of Philadelphia’s old line law firms. During my last week at work, I invited the head of Philadelphia’s oldest and largest art gallery (second oldest in the country) to stop by my downtown office to see my paintings hanging on my office walls. The gallery owner was impressed and pointed to a number of paintings he was willing to put in the gallery. And so began my professional career as an artist. The Philadelphia gallery later included Bonnie’s works in their portfolio. And in 2010, the Gallery devoted its annual two-month exhibition exclusively to a showing of nearly ninety of Bonnie’s and my paintings.

Since retiring, Bonnie and I have traveled frequently to Europe to paint and to meet with art clients. We have sold our work directly as well as through leading galleries in Philadelphia, on Philadelphia’s historic Main Line, in Santa Fe and in Stone Harbor, New Jersey. Each of us has won numerous awards (including “best in show”) at exhibitions, and we have been featured in articles in Philadelphia Magazine, 32963 Magazine (Vero Beach, FL) and other publications.