Wilhelmina Weber Furlong
(1878-1962) St. Louis, Missouri

Was a German American artist and teacher.
Among America’s earliest avant-garde elite modernist painters Weber Furlong was a major American artist who pioneered modern impressionistic and modern expressionistic still life painting at the turn of the twentieth century’s American modernist movement. She has been called the first female modernist painter in the early American Modernism scene, and she represents the struggles of many women artists in the late 1800s and early 1900’s as they became subjugated to the many realists who opposed the modernist movement and serious women artists.

Beginning in 1892 her teachers included Emil Carlsen, William Merritt Chase, and Edmund H. Wuerpel with significant time in Paris from 1898 to 1906. She was present at the Salon d’Automne or Autumn Salon for three years and she knew Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and others who exhibited at the Paris Salon.

In the American modernism movement she painted between 1892 and 1962 where she thrived during the modernist movement in St. Louis, New York, and Paris from 1897 to 1906. She painted in Mexico City from 1906 to 1913 and again in New York City from 1913 to 1950. It was in New York, that she helped to set the stage for the climax of the American modern art movement.

Her popular Manhattan, New York City studio and art gallery which exhibited her work was described by the New York Tribune as “Futurist” on May 10, 1914 she is also pictured among her many works.

She also painted at Lake George in Bolton Landing, New York from 1921 to 1962 at her Modern Art Colony, Golden Heart Farm and simultaneously in Glens Falls, New York from 1952 to 1962. She had many friends and students in Glens Falls, among them were Charlotte Hyde who founded the Hyde Collection Museum which displays the work of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong.

In America her significant circle of friends included, John Graham,Wilem de Kooning, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Rockwell and Sally Kent, Thomas Hart Benton, Jean Charlot, Allen Tucker, Max Weber, Kimon Nicolaidies, Ernest Lawson, and many others.

As a student, she was associated with the Art Students league as a young woman in 1892 and in 1913 began a serious role in the New York art scene and at the Art Students League as a Secretary Treasurer and member of the Board of Control along with her husband, the artist Thomas Furlong. She taught art for over 56 years in New York and she was active with the Whitney Studio Club during the formative years of the organization in New York. Weber Furlong coordinated events for the Art Students league and the Whitney Studio Club and she taught in Manhattan and on Lake George, Where she influenced David Smith, John Graham and Dorothy Dehner. With her new and brilliant colors and style she was able to influence the American expressionists from her 1913 studio and galleries throughout the American Modernist Movement.