A Fairfield Porter Gallery
Later Work in Maine (1972-1975)
3 Watercolors and 3 Oils
Fairfield Porter spent the seasonal warmer months of his life at his family's home on Great Spruce Head Island, Penobscot Bay. He said, "I've been to Maine almost every summer since I was six. It's the place where, most of all, I feel myself, to belong." (Fairfield Porter's Maine, Southampton, New York, 1977)
Fairfield Porter mused, "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: 'Make everything more beautiful.'"
The first painting below was painted the summer of 1975; he passed that September at 68-years-old. All six below were painted the last three years of his life, from 62 to 65-years-old.
North Point
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Watercolor on paper, 12" x 16" (w x h), 1975
Private collection
North Point No. 1
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Oil on board, 14" x 16" (w x h), 1972
Colby (College) Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Maine Landscape
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Watercolor on paper, 14" x 11" (w x h), 1973
Colby (College) Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
High Tide
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Oil on board, 18" x 22" (w x h), 1973
Christies October 2020 auction sold: $162,500 USD
Auction estimate: $100,000 - $150,000 USD
Source: The Art of Fairfield Porter by K. Moffett, exhibition catalogue, Boston, 1982:
Portraying the rocky shore and coastal islands of the area, High Tide of 1973 reflects the artist's personal connection with the Maine landscape, while exhibiting the more abstracted aesthetic of his later works. Reducing and simplifying the landforms, what remains is a pure representation of his surroundings. As in all of Porter's best works, High Tide delights in exploring the line "between a reaction to natural light and a search for invented color."
From North Point
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Watercolor on paper, 1973
The Tender
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) American
Oil on canvas, 30" x 28" (w x h), 1973
Sotheby's December 2009 auction sold: $590,500 USD
Auction estimate: $150,000 - $250,000 USD
About Fairfield Porter
Source Wiki and Mary Ryan Gallery, (edited):
Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was an American painter and art critic. He was the fourth of five children of James Porter, an architect, and Ruth Furness Porter, a poet from a literary family. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus. Porter did not gain notoriety until later in his career, making most of his major works during the last two decades of his life. His first solo show opened at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951. He was also a respected art critic and poet, writing for such publications as Art News, Arise, The Nation, and the Partisan Review. An artist of wide intellectual interests, Porter was a friend of many younger contemporary artists, such as Alex Katz and Larry Rivers, and modern poets Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler.
He studied art history at Harvard University before moving to NY in 1928 and enrolling at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton. Throughout his career, Fairfield Porter was both praised and criticized and for continuing his representational style in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, many of them affiliated with the New York School of writers. Many of his paintings were set in or around the family summer house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine and the family home in Southampton, New York. Though he favored the watercolor medium early and late in his career, he made pencil and ink drawings and painted in oils throughout his life. His painterly vision, which encompassed a fascination with nature and the ability to reveal extra ordinariness in ordinary life, was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.
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