John Fulton Folinsbee (1892-1972)

John Fulton Folinsbee was a talented and successful painter associated with the artists’ colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania.  He established his reputation in American art circles during the 1910s, winning acclaim for his impressionistic views of Bucks County scenery.  However, like a number of artists of his generation, Folinsbee’s art underwent a stylistic change around 1930, at which time he abandoned Impressionism in favor of a more personal, realist-based aesthetic which he applied to landscape and marine subjects inspired by scenery in Pennsylvania and Maine.

Folinsbee was born on March 14^th 1892 in Buffalo, New York, the second son of Harrison Davis Folinsbee and his wife, Louise.  After demonstrating considerable artistic talent as a child, his parents enrolled him in art classes at the Albright Art Gallery at the age of nine.  In 1906 he contracted polio, which left him bound to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life; however, notwithstanding his physical disability, Folinsbee never abandoned his desire to pursue a career as an artist.

John Folinsbee - Pemaquid, ca. 1940s
Oil on board, 26 x 40 inches

    In 1907, Folinsbee’s family sent him to Plainfield, New Jersey to live with some relatives.  There, while attending The Gunnery, a local boarding school, he continued his formal studies in the studio of the landscape painter Jonas Lie.  On his vacations, he studied anatomy and worked in the studio of the Washington, D.C.-based painter Herbert W. Faulkner.

 From 1912 until 1914, Folinsbee spent his summers in Woodstock, New York, where, under the auspices of the Art Students League of New York, he received instruction in landscape techniques from John F. Carlson.  He also became friendly with Birge Harrison, a prominent Tonalist landscape painter who gave him advice and support.  Folinsbee later credited Harrison for influencing his interest in structured designs and values of light and dark, and expressed gratitude to Carlson for “the soundness of the instruction” he received during his sojourns in Woodstock. ¹

In 1914, Folinsbee attended classes at the League’s headquarters in Manhattan, where he took life classes with Frank Vincent DuMond and portrait classes with John Johansen.  During that same year he married Ruth Standish Baldwin.  In 1916, after making a visit to Harrison at his home in picturesque New Hope, Folinsbee settled there permanently, moving into a house that afforded him an excellent view of the Delaware River.  In the ensuing years, he painted views of regional scenery, working in an impressionist style characterized by a vigorous paint handling and a soft, blue-toned palette.  He subsequently emerged as a noted member of the local art colony, a group of landscape painters that included Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber and others.  His depictions of the Delaware Valley, which included rural scenes as well as portrayals of factories and local canals, brought him numerous awards, including the National Academy of Design’s Second Julius Hallgarten Prize (1917), Carnegie Prize (1921) and J. Francis Murphy Prize (1921).  During these years, Folinsbee also painted portraits, including many likenesses of his fellow artists.  His artistic output also includes still lifes and genre subjects.

After visiting France in 1926, Folinsbee developed a broader, more direct manner of painting and abandoned the pale tonalities of his earlier work in favor of brighter colors.  By the late 1920s, seeking a more subjective style that conveyed emotion, he adopted a realist approach in which he conjoined a dynamic technique with a dark, low-keyed palette and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow; as he put it, the “function of art [is] communication.” ²  Many of his later landscapes are moody in tone, often featuring dark, turbulent skies.  Folinsbee continued to paint views of New Hope and its environs for the remainder of his career, although after 1949, at which time he acquired a summer residence on Montsweag Bay in Maine, he turned increasingly to coastal scenes in which he studied the movement of water and cloud-filled skies.

In addition to displaying his work at the major national annuals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., Folinsbee participated in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Newport Art Association, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts and the Salmagundi Club.  He was a member of the leading art societies of hid day, among them the National Academy of Design, the National Arts Club, and the Century Association.  He had one-man shows at the Ferargil Galleries in New York in 1938 and 1941.  During the Depression years, Folinsbee executed WPA murals for post offices in Freeland and Burgettstown, Pennsylvania and for the courthouse in Paducah, Kentucky.

Folinsbee died in New Hope on May 10^th 1972.  One year later the Century Association in New York held a memorial exhibition in his honor.  The artist is represented in museum collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Arts Club, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Reading Public Museum, Pennsylvania; the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.

CL

 

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