John Fulton Folinsbee

Who was John Fulton Folinsbee?

John Fulton Folinsbee 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 Woodstock, and also with Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students’ League in New York. At Woodstock, he met Harry 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, whom he had met in Washington, Connecticut. They moved to New Hope in 1916, and had two daughters, Beth and Joan.