John Fulton Folinsbee was a landscape painter and leading member of the circle of artists known as the New Hope School of American Impressionism. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1892, Folinsbee began his artistic training with Jonas Lie in 1907. From 1912 through 1914, he attended the Art Students League summer sessions in Woodstock, New York, where he studied landscape painting with Birge Harrison and John Carlson. In 1914, he attended the school’s main campus in New York City where he studied with Frank Dumond.
Folinsbee was the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Isadore Prize, Salmagundi Club, 1920; the Bronze Medal and Third Clark Prize, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1912; the First Hallgarten Prize, National Academy of Design, 1923; Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal, 1923; Charles Noel Flagg Prize, Connecticut Academy of Fine Art; Bronze Medal, Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia, 1926; the Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1931; the First Altman Prize, National Academy of Design, 1941 and 1950; the Grand Central Gallery Landscape Prize, 1944; and the Century Association Medal in 1951 and 1963.
He became a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1928 and also held memberships in the Allied Artists of America, the Salmagundi Club, and the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts.
John Folinsbee’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; the National Academy of Design, New York, NY; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; and the Art Museum of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, among many others.
The artist died in 1972.