Full Name: Jones, Frances Follin
Gender: female
Date Born: 1912
Date Died: 1999
Place Died: Haverford, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery, PA, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): Classical
Career(s): curators
Overview
Classicist and curator of collections at The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1943-1983. Jones studied Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr University, receiving her B.A. in 1934. She participated in the excavation of the ancient city of Tarsus directed by archaeologist Hetty Goldman. In 1939 she joined Goldman as her assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study, a private research center near Princeton University. Jones began working part-time for the Princeton Art Museum in 1943, still assisting Goldman, but soon became a full-time member of the Museum staff. At that time, the staff consisted of herself; the director Professor Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., and a janitor-guard. Because of gas rationing during World War II, Mather only came to Princeton once a week, leaving Jones essentially in charge. As both a secretary and assistant curator of Classical art, Jones cataloged the Museum’s holdings and researched objects from all areas of art. She became curator of Classical art in 1946. Jones’ 1950 chapter on the pottery of the Tarsus dig was published Hellenistic and Roman Pottery from Tarsus, in Excavations at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus I, and accepted by Goldman as her dissertation from Bryn Mawr in 1952. She joined the Princeton archaeological expedition to Sicily in 1955 and 1959, and was a visiting member of the excavations at Curium, Cyprus, under the sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania, and Aphrodisias, Turkey, directed by New York University. Jones was one of the American correspondents for Fasti Archaeologici beginning in 1955, a journal compilation of articles in archaeology. She was a founding editor of the Record of The Art Museum. Jones attended the month meetings of the Archaeology Club, an informal group of classical art historians, whose ranks included Dorothy Kent Hill of the Walters Gallery, Homer Thompson (1906-2000) and his wife Dorothy Burr Thompson of the Institute for Advanced Study, Otto J. Brendel of Columbia University and his wife, Maria, and Evelyn B. Harrison. A second publication, Ancient Art in the Art Museum, Princeton University, appeared in 1960. She was promoted to curator of collections at The Gallery in 1971. Jones retired at age seventy in 1983 and was succeeded by Robert Guy. She lived at the Quadrangle retirement community in Haverford, PA, where she died sixteen years later.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] “The Pottery”, Chapter 6 of, Goldman, Hetty, ed. Excavations at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950,[Bryn Mawr, 1950]; Ancient Art in the Art Museum, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
Sources
Rosenbaum, Allen. “Forward.” Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum, Princeton University, Greek Originals, Roman Copies and Variants. Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1994; [obituaries:] “Art Museum Curator Frances Follin Jones Dies.” Princeton University Office of Communications. http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q1/0219-jones.htm.