While most of the Pennsylvania Impressionists concentrated on depicting the bucolic landscape that surrounded them, John Fulton Folinsbee was drawn to painting scenes from the region’s daily, workaday life. His paintings often show harbors, canals, and small villages––all modest locations where people lived and worked. His fellow New Hope artists painted out the factories and mills that dotted the countryside, and he painted them in. Folinsbee’s fondness for such subject matter placed his work in the company of other American Post-Impressionists, who were rebelling against traditional notions of beauty in art. In fact, it could be argued that Folinsbee’s approach to painting was closer to the artists of the Ashcan School than to such other Pennsylvania Impressionists as William Langson Lathrop or Daniel Garber.1

Folinsbee was a prolific painter and cultivated two distinct artistic styles during his career. Early on, he used small, broken brushstrokes and a limited palette to make his landscape paintings. The great delicacy and serenity that mark these works won Folinsbee acclaim among his peers and collectors alike. However, he was not content to remain creatively idle, so in the late 1920s Folinsbee’s style started to change. His palette grew darker, his brushwork bolder. His interest in the same subject matter remained, but his late paintings, many of which were painted in Maine, look vastly different. They are moody, strong, and energetic.

Folinsbee’s compositions from the 1920s, of which Shad Fisherman is one, fall into his early style. He painted these works vigorously, with pigment applied thickly in short brushstrokes that appear as if they are woven onto the canvas. The subtle gradations of color and tone blend seamlessly, creating the cohesive allover effect that was a signature of his style. The silvery atmosphere creates a quiet poeticism that was equally defining of these works.