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for Thomas Dow Jones
1817 - 1891
Jones' father was a mason and stone cutter who had emigrated to America from Wales in 1800. He learned his father's trade and worked with him until went the whole family move to Ohio in 1837, when he became an independent builder. These projects put him in various towns around Ohio over the next several years; an advertisement for a proposal to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama brought him to Cincinnati in 1841. The scheme proved baseless, but as he found himself in the West's most cultured community, he turned to sculpting, initially grave monuments, but within a year had his first commission for a portrait bust. This first effort brought him praise--and further commissions, many of which were for portraits of distinguished citizens such as Henry Clay, but he also executed works on religious themes. Several of his commission required his traveling great distances to reach the portrait subject. The state of Louisiana ordered a bust of Lewis Cass, which required Jones to go to Michigan, where he received more work, including a commission from the state of Michigan for a bust of Gen. Winfield Scott which required him to go to New York.
On Jones's arrival in New York in 1851, he opened a studio on Broadway where he was soon successfully established producing portrait busts and portrait medallions, but also more ambitious works, notable among which was a relief involving a number of figures on an allegorical theme, executed in 1853 to order for the Welsh citizens of New York for presentation for the Washington Monument.
Jones first exhibited in an Academy annual in 1853; one of the two portrait medallions he showed was of Thomas Addison Richards, landscape painter, and serving the first of what would prove a forty-year tenure as the Academy's corresponding secretary. Richards seems to have been a close acquaintance or supporter; he presented the Academy with portrait medallions by Jones of himself and of James Cafferty. These were probably in plaster, and have not survived. Jones sculptures continued to appear in Academy annuals through 1856, the year he returned to the West, where he remained a prolific and highly regarded sculptor throughout his life.
On Jones's arrival in New York in 1851, he opened a studio on Broadway where he was soon successfully established producing portrait busts and portrait medallions, but also more ambitious works, notable among which was a relief involving a number of figures on an allegorical theme, executed in 1853 to order for the Welsh citizens of New York for presentation for the Washington Monument.
Jones first exhibited in an Academy annual in 1853; one of the two portrait medallions he showed was of Thomas Addison Richards, landscape painter, and serving the first of what would prove a forty-year tenure as the Academy's corresponding secretary. Richards seems to have been a close acquaintance or supporter; he presented the Academy with portrait medallions by Jones of himself and of James Cafferty. These were probably in plaster, and have not survived. Jones sculptures continued to appear in Academy annuals through 1856, the year he returned to the West, where he remained a prolific and highly regarded sculptor throughout his life.
