James Albert Hanes (1924 – 2015) was a mid twentieth-century American painter and a significant member of the Philadelphia art community. He was a long-time Artist-in-Residence and art instructor at LaSalle University, whose art department he founded. His works can be seen in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Yale University, the National Academy of Design (which awarded him first prize for painting in 1962), the University of Tampa, and the LaSalle University Museum of Fine Art, as well as in the private collections of Randall Thompson, noted classicist Larry Richardson (Duke University), sculptor Charles Parks, G. Griffon (Princeton University), Robert Penn Warren, and others. He influenced many artists on the Philadelphia art scene, among them noted sculptor Zenos Frudakis. Although he painted a number of portraits on commission, examples of which are included on this site, he often shied away from commissions, noting in a 1973 interview that “too often the artist’s integrity is compromised by what the patron considers acceptable.”
He served in World War II, at age 20 landing on Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy. As he pushed forward with the U.S. Army to make its rendezvous with Patton’s army, Hanes used his army-issued watercolor kit and hit pencil and notepad to capture scenes of the devastated French countryside. His heirs still have these, as well as some of the drawings he made while sitting hunched in the boats, little more than oversized tubs, that carried the soldiers over the English Channel to land at Normandy – pencil drawings of the towering gunwales of the boats and of the endless sky above. In 1945 the Army put him on furlough long enough for him to study art at the U.S. Army School in Biarritz. This began a period of extensive training: after the war, he returned to Philadelphia and studied for three years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, studying under Roy Nuse, among others, and winning the Academy’s Cresson Traveling Scholarship, the Lambert Purchase Prize, and the Toppan Prize for figure composition. In 1950 he won a Tiffany Foundation grant, and in the same year the National Academy of Design Gold Medal, the first of four prizes given to him by the National Academy in the course of his career. With the encouragement of his mentor Albert Barnes, he applied for and won the Prix de Rome, where he was a Jules Guerin Fellow for three years, ultimately earning the lifetime designation of Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR) in 1953.
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