John Fulton Folinsbee (American, 1892–1972) Salmon Weir

Signed 'John Folinsbee' bottom left, oil on canvas
33 7/8 x 50 in. (86 x 127cm)

Provenance

Collection of Mr. James Murphy.
Acquired directly from the above.
Collection of Sydney F. and Sharon Martin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
The Estate of Sydney F. Martin.

Note

The present work will be added to the online Catalogue Raisonné of the Artist's work.

With its rocky coastline, craggy shores and uneven, seemingly undomesticated terrain, Maine had potential to attract artists, such as Edward Redfield, who started summering in Boothbay Harbor in 1903, and later Monhegan Island where he bought a house. Maine became Folinsbee's primary focus in the 1950s, after he purchased Murphy's Corner, an old farmhouse near Woolwich, overlooking Montsweag Bay. Although the artist did not have Redfield's physical agility, he still captured the raw beauty of the littoral with a vivid, dynamic and liberating brushwork, either from land or at sea, which became possible once the artist bought a lobster boat, Sketch, which enabled him to approach the water without too much difficulty, and capture its transcient nature from different perspectives.

The present landscape presents a bird's-eye view of the open sea, most likely off Seguin Island, where one spots a salmon weir stretching at a diagonal between the land and a small island in the middle of the composition. Via smooth and fluid strokes of dark greens, blues and whites from left to right, Folinsbee suggests the strong, turbulent wind which plows the region and forces the water to constantly hit and recede from the shore, which conveys a theatrical effect to the painting. As Kristen Jensen notes, "Folinsbee saw in the water what Homer, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and countless others saw - a challenge to transfer onto the still canvas the essence of movement, of something undergoing constant transformation not only volumetrically, but also tonally and in the way the light reflects off its ever-changing surface."