Annie Barker Folger (1852 - 1936)

Nantucket-born pastel artist Annie Barker Folger’s career is emblematic of the opportunities for women artists that arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Folger attended Vassar College. She became a charter member of the Art Students League in NY City, which admitted women students at an early date.

Folger lived at 22 Lily Street near friend and fellow artist Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin. There she developed a remarkable oeuvre of pastel streetscapes, still lifes, and landscapes of the island’s moors, beaches, and ponds. Her pastels are lush evocations of turn-of-the century Nantucket. As a colorist, Folger introduced a new degree of brightness and boldness, in noticeable contrast with the pervasively somber tone of her immediate predecessors.

Folger painted on Nantucket during the 1920s and served as an important link to the burgeoning art colony that was developing in the 1900s and 1910s. She exhibited at many of the island’s early art outlets, and later, during the height of the Island’s Art Colony, Folger showed at the Candle House Studio on Commercial Wharf and the Easy Street Gallery from its inception in 1924 into the 1930s. Her work is in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association.
(Quoted from The Nantucket Historical Association)

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