About the artist:

Joseph John Jones was an American painter, landscape painter, lithographer, and muralist. Time magazine followed him throughout his career. Jones was associated with the John Reed Club and his name is closely associated with its artistic members, most of them also contributors to the New Masses magazine.

Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri, April 7, 1909. Self-taught, he quit school at age fifteen to work as a house painter, his father's profession.

Jones worked in his native St. Louis, Missouri, until age 27, then spent the rest of his life based in or around New York City. His work is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the 1930s, Jones was a member of the John Reed Clubs.

Jones died on April 9, 1963, in Morristown, New Jersey. As reported by Time he was 54 years old. Of his early, radical work, the magazine cited American Justice with the corpse of a half-naked black woman who has been raped and lynched against a background of quietly chatting Ku Klux Klansmen. For his later, "softer Japanese-like style," it cited his December 1961 cover and a mural of Boston Harbor in the dining salon of the SS Independence.