John Fulton Folinsbee

John Fulton Folinsbee (March 14, 1892 – May 10, 1972) was an American landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of New Hope and Lambertville, New Jersey, particularly the factories, quarries, and canals along the Delaware River.

Folinsbee was born in Buffalo, New York. As a child, he attended classes at the Art Students’ League of Buffalo, but received his first formal training in with the landscape painter Jonas Lie when he was fifteen. Between 1907 and 1911, he attended the Gunnery School in Washington, Connecticut, where he studied with Elizabeth Kempton and Herbert Faulkner. He later studied with Birge Harrison and John Carlson in (summers, 1912–1914), and also with Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students’ League in 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, the daughter of William H. Baldwin, Jr. and Ruth Standish Baldwin (co-founder of the National Urban League), whom he had met in Washington, Connecticut. They moved to New Hope in 1916, and had two daughters, Beth and Joan.

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.

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