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for John Folinsbee
John Folinsbee
American, 1892 - 1972
By Kirsten M. Jensen
John Folinsbee was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1892. He displayed an early interest in art, and, at the age of nine, attended art classes for children at the Buffalo Art Students’ League; he continued to draw after his family moved to Boston a few years later. In 1907, he received his first formal arts instruction during several months of study in New Jersey with the Norwegian-born artist Jonas Lie, who introduced him to plein-air landscape painting. That fall, Folinsbee left New Jersey for Washington, Connecticut, to attend boarding school at The Gunnery School, and for the next several years Washington was his home.[1] It was perhaps a happy coincidence that Washington, like many other small towns in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, attracted artists who established a small arts colony there.[2] The artists in Washington were primarily figure painters—Henry Siddons Mowbray and Herbert Waldron Faulkner most prominent among them—but their salons drew many others to the area, including the Impressionist landscape painter Frank Vincent DuMond, who visited Washington in 1911. Folinsbee spent two years studying with Faulkner, reading from his library, studying Japanese prints, drawing from the live model, and meeting artists like DuMond who stopped by Faulkner’s studio.
Had it not been for DuMond’s visit, and the gift of L. Birge Harrison’s book Landscape Painting from a friend (his future wife, Ruth Baldwin) in 1912, Folinsbee might have become a full-time figure painter (he painted portraits throughout his career). But Harrison was at the time the head of the summer school of the Art Students’ League of New York, located in Woodstock, and his book was a compilation of past lectures given to students there. In addition to discussing color, technique, and composition, Harrison stressed independent artistic vision, and the “importance of fearlessness” in painting, about which he declared, “Aim to tell the truth; but if you have to lie, lie courageously.”[3] If that bold statement was not enough to ensnare the twenty-year-old artist, the book’s twenty-four half-tone reproductions of landscapes—by French masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Claude Monet, as well as by leading American landscape painters Dwight William Tryon, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Edward Redfield, George Inness, William Lathrop, and W. Elmer Schofield—certainly were. When the snow cleared that spring, Folinsbee was on the next train to Woodstock. He spent three summers at Woodstock, two as a student and one as an independent artist sharing a studio with Harry Leith-Ross, who became a life-long friend. Harrison invited both artists to stay with him in Woodstock and paint during the winter of 1913–14. Folinsbee also took classes at the Art Students’ League in the city during the winter and spring terms of 1912–13. That was all the formal instruction he received, and he apparently did not require more.
He had his first work accepted for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1913, when he was only twenty-one, and three years later received his first award from the National Academy jury, a Third Hallgarten Prize. He quickly became a regular presence there, winning nearly every prize—some more than once—during his sixty-year career. He also won accolades at other venues—at the Corcoran Gallery Biennials, and the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Salmagundi Club, and the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
For several years early in his career, Folinsbee was represented in New York by Macbeth Gallery—the first gallery in New York devoted to American art and the site of the legendary exhibition of The Eight in 1908. After his move to New Hope in 1916, he continued to maintain a presence in the city. Beginning in 1917, and for nearly four decades afterward, he was represented by Ferargil Gallery, located at 24 East 49th Street, where he had a solo show nearly every year. In 1923, he became a founding member of the Grand Central Art Galleries, a cooperative located in the Grand Central Terminal building and devoted to promoting contemporary American art. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1919, and became a full Academician nine years later. He frequently served as a juror for their annual exhibitions during the thirties and forties. Folinsbee was elected a member of the Salmagundi Club in 1913, a Life Member of the National Arts Club in 1921, and a member of the Century Association in 1937; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1953, one of the highest honors an artist can receive.
Although Folinsbee exhibited at museums, galleries, and private clubs in Pennsylvania, he never pursued active representation or membership in them, instead focusing his professional attention on the nation’s art capital, New York, while at the same time broadening recognition of his work in exhibitions across the country. He had his first solo exhibition at the Hillyer Gallery at Smith College in Massachusetts, in 1916. From then, until well into the 1940s, his work could be seen in traveling exhibitions organized by the American Federation of Arts, as well as in various international expositions and exhibitions in American embassies. By his mid-thirties, he had a national reputation that extended to Texas, Ohio, Missouri, California, Indiana, and elsewhere—far beyond the boundaries of Bucks County, with which he is so closely associated today.
Although his manner of painting changed as he incorporated more contemporary ideas and techniques, the essence of Birge Harrison’s early influence remained constant. Folinsbee approached his work with a fearlessness and independence that is evident in the emotional force of his paintings and the vigor of his brushstrokes, as well as the way in which he responded to those—particularly critics and gallery owners—who sought to influence the nature of his painting and the direction of his career.[4] He would never have described himself as a “Modernist,” but equally would he have eschewed the term “Impressionist” or “conservative” to describe his work. He had little time or need for “isms,” and thought of himself merely as a Realist, an artist seeking to reveal the deeper truth of the world around him. In doing so, he subscribed to no single “truth,” but instead filtered the broad array of stylistic influences, both traditional and contemporary, into a method of painting that was uniquely his own.
Notes
[1] Folinsbee lived at the time with his aunt and uncle, Julia and Robert McCutcheon, and his five cousins. During the summer of 1906, he contracted polio, and although he was left dependent on a wheelchair following his illness, he quickly adapted to and surmounted his physical limitations to live a full and active life. The McCutcheons, who lived in Plainfield, New Jersey, had built a summer cottage just off the Washington Town Green, which made it possible for him to stay in town when school was not in session. He returned to Washington after his marriage to Ruth Baldwin in 1914, and the couple lived there until 1916.
[2] Emil Carlsen, Willard Metcalf, Charles Morris Young, Henry Hobart Nichols, and Robert Louis Reid were among the artists who settled in the region to paint its rolling hills, broad peaceful pastures, and the picturesque valleys of the Housatonic and Shepaug Rivers. See Robert Michael Austin, Artists of the Litchfield Hills (Mattatuck Historical Society, 2003).
[3] L. Birge Harrison, Landscape Painting (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 158.
[4] Robert Macbeth, for example, commented on Folinsbee’s changing technique and the prices he charged for his paintings, which Macbeth noted were higher than those charged by more established artists. While Folinsbee seemed to take these criticisms in stride, he switched to Ferargil Gallery shortly thereafter.
This essay was previously published in the exhibition catalogue, John Folinsbee and American Modernism (Philadelphia: The Woodmere Art Museum, 2010).
http://www.folinsbee.org/bio
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