John Fulton "Jack" Folinsbee (March 14, 1892 – May 10, 1972) was an American landscape, marine and portrait painter, and a member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best remembered for his impressionist scenes of New Hope and Lambertville, New Jersey, particularly the factories, quarries, and canals along the Delaware River.
Biography He was born in Buffalo, New York, the middle son of Harrison and Louise Mauger Folinsbee. Beginning at age nine, he attended children's classes at the Art Students' League of Buffalo, but received his first formal training with the landscape painter Jonas Lie in 1907. Folinsbee contracted polio at age 14, which rendered his legs useless, weakened his right arm, and left him permanently reliant on a wheelchair.Folinsbee and Maine, from Michener Art Museum. He attended The Gunnery, a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, from 1907 to 1911, where he studied with Elizabeth Kempton and Herbert Faulkner. He later studied with Birge Harrison and John Carlson at the Woodstock art colony (Summers, 1912–1914), and with Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League of New York.
At Woodstock, he met Harry (Tony) Leith-Ross, who became a lifelong friend and later followed him to New Hope. In 1914, Folinsbee married Ruth Baldwin (August 8, 1890 – February 13, 1991)Obituary: "Ruth Baldwin Folinsbee, Volunteer, 100," The New York Times, February 16, 1991. – daughter of William H. Baldwin, Jr. and Ruth Standish Baldwin – whom he had met in Washington, Connecticut. The couple moved to New Hope in 1916, and had two daughters, Elizabeth (1917–2016, married Elmer W. Wiggins, 1940); and Joan (1919–2016, married Peter G. Cook, 1938).Peter G. Cook, John Folinsbee (New York: Kubaba Books, 1994).
Early in his career, Folinsbee painted in a tonalist style, with an interest in light and atmosphere that grew directly from his time with Harrison and Carlson in Woodstock. By the late nineteen-teens, he had moved away from tonalism into a more structured, impressionist style. In the mid-1920s, Folinsbee began studying the work of Cézanne, which led to a trip to France in the summer of 1926. The paintings that resulted from this trip, and those that followed later in the decade, reflect a deep understanding of Cézanne's compositional strategies and a desire to reveal the underlying structure of forms. Folinsbee's exploration of structure led eventually to an analytical, highly individual expressionist style in which he painted for the remainder of his career. His palette darkened, his brushstrokes loosened further, and his sense of light and atmosphere became more dramatic. These later works are concerned with conveying a sense of mood and an intense emotional response to the world around him.Kirsten M. Jensen, "Contour, Bones and Skin: Cézanne's Influence on John Folinsbee." Fine Art Connoisseur 4, no. 4 (July/August 2007): 51-55.
New Hope Folinsbee painted en plein air, directly from nature. He always had a sketchbook or a box of 8 x 10 inch canvasboards with him, ready to capture any scene that caught his eye. He and Leith-Ross were famous for spending afternoons sketching from the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge (and for tossing anything that displeased them into the Delaware River).Kirsten M. Jensen, Folinsbee Considered. New York, NY: Hudson Hills Press, 2014. From his wheelchair, Folinsbee could manage "paintings as large as 24 X 30." Larger works were painted in his studio based on drawings and oil sketches. He frequently repeated the same scene on different sized canvases, or as an etching or lithograph. To paint a large work, he would lean a canvas against the studio wall and sit on the floor before it, his withered legs tucked under him. Relying on notes made on the spot about color and light, he would edit the scene as he painted, emphasizing or eliminating elements to enhance the overall mood. "The larger studio paintings were never simply blown-up versions of a successful small painting: rather they were developments of a theme along expressive lines, with memory and emotional reaction playing an important role."
The Folinsbees purchased an acre of riverfront land in New Hope, about a quarter-mile upstream from the bridge and across the street from the house they were renting. In 1924, they hired architect (and landscape painter) Morgan Colt to design them an Arts & Crafts-style house and studio.Annual Exhibition, (National Academy of Design, 1965), p. 30. Folinsbee painted dozens of views of the river from the property – most notably Winter Nocturne (1926),Winter Nocturne, from John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. River Ice (1936),River Ice, from John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. and his last major work, Zero Morning (1970)Zero Morning, from John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. – and some views of the house itself.Studio Terrace, from John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. They lived at 160 North Main Street until their deaths.
In 1929, the Folinsbees were among the founders of Phillips' Mill, an arts center housed in a former grist mill, and Ruth Folinsbee served as the first vice-president of its community association. He participated in art exhibitions there from 1929 into the 1960s.Geoff Gehman, "Phillips' Mill in Bucks still leaving lasting impressions after 75 years," The Morning Call (Doylestown, Pennsylvania), June 30, 2005. His Shag Ledge (1959) was awarded the 1963 First Patron's Prize by Phillips' Mill.Shag Ledge, from John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. The Folinsbees were also founding members of the Bucks County Playhouse.
The Great Depression dealt a heavy blow to artists, with little market for luxury goods such as landscape paintings. Folinsbee resorted to bartering his works for services, including dentistry for his daughters. Portraits – for which he typically charged $400 to $500 for a head-and-bust and $1,000 for a three-quarter-length – became a larger part of his output. Edward Beatty Rowan, assistant chief of the Public Buildings Administration's Section of Painting and Sculpture, offered him a commission for a post office mural in Freeland, Pennsylvania. Completed in 1938, Folinsbee's mural is both pastoral and industrial: depicting the town's church spires peeking out from among the autumnal-colored hills, but also featuring the town's massive coal breaker and its long culm dump.
Folinsbee was also a teacher. One of his better-known students, Peter G. Cook (who married his daughter Joan in 1938), became a colleague and friend. The pair collaborated on murals for two other federal projects: the Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Paducah, Kentucky (1939), and the post office in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania (1942).
Maine In the mid-1930s, Folinsbee and his family began spending their summers in Maine. He bought a farmhouse at Murphy's Corner, between Bath and Wiscasset, in 1949. Despite his intense wariness of the ocean, he embarked on a new aspect of his career—as a marine painter. His Off Seguin (Ellingwood Rock) was awarded the 1952 Palmer Marine Prize by the National Academy of Design. With the prize money, Folinsbee bought a 25-foot motorized Hampton dory (flat-bottomed open boat) that he named "Sketch" and equipped as a floating studio.Michele Pavone Stricker, John Folinsbee, 1892–1972: Following His Own Course, exhibition catalogue, Newman Galleries, March 2 to April 7, 1990.
Folinsbee was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1960s, which further weakened his right arm. He stopped painting in 1971, and died a year later in New Hope.
Critical reception and honors
Folinsbee's work has been described as the "rural counterpart" to the Ashcan School. Critic Robert E. Baum (son of artist Walter Emerson Baum) saw in him "the power, frankness, and story-telling quality of a George Bellows or a Winslow Homer. This man sees the rhythm of beauty coupled with a color harmony in many workaday nooks that may seem ugly to the average passerby."Robert Emerson Baum, "John Folinsbee, One of New Hope's Pioneers, Nationally Known as a Landscape Artist," The Allentown Call (Pennsylvania), June 3, 1940. In Modern American Painting (1940), Peyton Boswell, Jr. placed him among the "Lyricists"—"the moody ones, dreamers and mystics," who "work sometimes in pattern, but more often in terms of light, shadow and chiaroscuro. They use color and form for emotional rather than aesthetic reasons."Peyton Boswell, Jr., Modern American Painting, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1940), pp. 89-90.
Folinsbee was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1919, and a full Academician in 1928."John Fulton Folinsbee, from National Academy Museum. He was elected a member of the Salmagundi Club in 1913, a life member of the National Arts Club in 1922,Carol Lowrey, A Legacy of Art: Paintings and Sculptures by Artist Life Members of the National Arts Club (New York: National Arts Club, 2007). and a member of the Century Association in 1937. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1953.
Folinsbee was represented by Ferargil Gallery in New York City for most of his career. His paintings were included in touring exhibitions across the United States, and in several international exhibitions. He won nearly every award given by the National Academy of Design, receiving some of them multiple times. He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts most years from 1915 to 1952, and was awarded the 1931 Jessie Sesnan Medal (for Canal and River).Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Volume III 1914–1968, (PAFA, Sound View Press, 1989), pp. 187-88. He also won awards from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Salmagundi Club, and other arts organizations. He was awarded a bronze medal at the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia (for Outskirts of Trenton).
Legacy Folinsbee's work is in the permanent collections of major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.Chronology, from John Fulton Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonné. A bronze bust of him by his friend Harry Rosin is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.John Folinsbee (1945) by Harry Rosin, from PAFA.
Folinsbee's students included artists Peter G. Cook and Evelyn Allen Faherty.Obituary: Evelyn Faherty, Bucks County Courier-Times, January 25, 2015. Cook became his son-in-law, and wrote a personal memoir, John Folinsbee (1994).
Kirsten M. Jensen, senior curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is the author of Folinsbee Considered (2014), a scholarly biography and catalogue raisonné. The Michener Museum maintains an online version of the catalogue raisonné, which is updated as additional Folinsbee works are identified.
Selected works Landscapes
Poughkeepsie Bridge (1914), private collection. Awarded the 1914 Isidore Prize by the Art Students League of New York. Gloucester Hillside (1916), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.Gloucester Hillside, from Princeton University Art Museum. February (Village in Winter) (1916), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.February, from Hood Museum of Art. Canal in Winter (1916-17), National Arts Club, New York City. Awarded the 1917 Second Hallgarten Prize by the National Academy of Design. Along the Canal (1916-21), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.Along the Canal, from The Phillips Collection. Oncoming Clouds (1918), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina.Oncoming Clouds, from NCMA. Grey Thaw (1920), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (ex coll. Corcoran Gallery of Art).