The New Hope Artists Colony: John Fulton Folinsbee

"Canal, Trenton" by John F. Folinsbee

"If John Fulton Folinsbee is normally associated with the New Hope School and Impressionism, he only painted in that style for a short period. By the mid-1920s, the artist began to study the work of Paul Cezanne and his landscapes demonstrate an exploration of his subjects’ structure and contour. By the late 1930s, when he immersed himself in the work of El Greco, Goya, and the French Expressionist Maurice Vlaminck, Folinsbee’s style became highly expressive. His brush strokes loosened and lengthened. The shimmering, gem-like colors and bright light that characterized his early work were replaced by dramatic contrasts in light and dark, and with color that was deeper and more intense. Russell Lynes asserted that the artist’s best work was created from this moment on. “After he escaped from the formulas that permeated the Impressionists,” Lynes wrote, Folinsbee’s “brush became more flowing, bolder, surer, and more personal, more concerned with contour and bones than with skin.”*

 

"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 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)."**

To be continued

1. "About John Fulton Folinsbee" by Kirsten M. Jensen in "The John F. Folinsbee Catalogue Raisonne."

2. "John Fulton Folinsbee" on Wikipedia.)