Jean Jones Jackson (1907-1984) was an American Surrealist painter. After studies in Paris and at the Art Students League, she started drawing in 1947 and then painting in 1950. In the 1950s, she would have New York solo exhibitions at Hugo Gallery and Maynard Walker Gallery and eventually, in 1968, landed a solo exhibition at the famed Betty Parsons Gallery. Writing to Jean in January 1968, dealer and artist Betty Parsons remarks, “We had a very good time showing your paintings. Everybody, including the artists in the Gallery, were very enthusiastic about them. We sold eleven which I think is very good for a first show and I expect to sell the rest of them before summer.” Despite Jackson’s modest commercial success, positive critical reviews (including one in Time magazine in 1969) and placement in prominent art collections of the era (including those of Paul Mellon and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), her work struggled to gain the kind traction that other star members of Parsons’ stable easily did.

For much of her career, Jackson lived half the year in a barn on the river side of Newtown Turnpike in Weston, Connecticut which her patron Alice DeLamar turned into apartment units. Her dashing blue-eyed sailor husband, Sandy, was 20 years her junior and mostly lived in the Forge, a red antique building perched right on the edge of the road adjacent to Alice DeLamar’s CT estate. Like Dudley Huppler, many winters were spent with DeLamar at the South Ocean Boulevard estate in Palm Beach, a home which originally belonged to the American Modernist painter, Gerald Murphy. The spirit and atmosphere of her surroundings in both Connecticut and Florida would make their way into many paintings.

In Jackson’s copious letters in DeLamar she spoke mostly of the woods, Sandy’s “Hill Billy” friends, plants, flowers, trees and animals. She talked a little about her painting and longed for places where she could be alone, remarking in the early-1980s that, “There doesn’t seem any place I can get to be a hermit.”