Jean Verity Jones

Jean Verity Jones (5 July 1927 – 28 April 2012) was an English painter who spent the majority of her life living in Oxford, Devon and Primrose Hill. She produced over 400 artworks, including a variety of landscapes, portraits, self-portraits and still lifes, which engage varyingly with the legacies of Expressionism and Post-Impressionism. Nonetheless, her talents were recognised throughout her lifetime. Jones had a solo exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 1980, as well as notable reviews from David Carritt and K.J. Garlick. The British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch even claimed that Jones would one day be 'as famous as Van Gogh'. Her only brother, John Armstrong Robinson also became a civil servant, serving most notably as Head of Britain's European Integration Department from 1968 to 1970, and Assistant Under-Secretary of State from 1971 to 1973.

After leaving school, Jones briefly attended Saint Martin's School of Art in London, where she studied under the tutelage of Ruskin Spear, before opting to put aside her passion for painting, and matriculating at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English. She later married John Jones, a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford and later the 38th Oxford Professor of Poetry (1978–83) and moved to Oxford with her new husband immediately, taking up residence in Holywell Cottage on St Cross Road. The marriage produced two children, Jeremy and Janet. In 1999, Duncan Campbell Contemporary Art held a studio sale of her work.

In October 2020, a team led by Jones's grandson organised the first exhibition of her work in over twenty years at The Brownston Gallery, Modbury.