Fairfield Porter
FAIRFIELD PORTER (1907–1975)
View from the South Meadow, 1969
Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.
Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower left): Fairfield Porter 69; (on the stretcher): View from the South Meadow oil Fairfield Porter 1969 48” x 60”
RECORDED: Michael Brenson, “Porter Paintings on Display,” New York Times, September 13, 1985, sec. C, p. 24 // Joan Ludman, “Checklist of the Paintings by Fairfield Porter,” in Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), p. 300 // Joan Ludman, Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001), no. L706, pp. 256–57.
EXHIBITED: Whitney Museum of American Art, Fairfield County, Stamford, Connecticut, October 23–December 9, 1981, The American Landscape: New Developments, illus. in color // The Arts Club of Chicago, Illinois, November 12–December 31, 1984, Fairfield Porter: Paintings and Works on Paper, no. 21 // Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, September 5–28, 1985, Fairfield Porter, 1907–1975, no. 31 illus. in color // Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, November 14–December 20, 1985, The Realist Landscape
EX COLL.: the artist; to his estate; to [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York]; to private collection, New York, 1989 until the present
Landscape themes also played a key role in Porter's art, especially in relation to his family retreat on Great Spruce Head, a private island (about one mile long and one-half mile wide) situated in Penobscot Bay, Maine, which was acquired by Porter’s father, James, in 1910. Porter began spending his summers on Great Spruce Head at age thirteen and he continued to make seasonal visits there for the remainder of his life. Drawn to the region’s ever-shifting light and atmosphere, the intriguing configurations of land, water, and sky, and the verdant nature of his surroundings, he produced some of his finest work on Great Spruce Head––a subject he approached with affection and nostalgia.
Porter’s depictions of Great Spruce Head include View from the South Meadow––a subject, as his older brother, the photographer and environmentalist Eliot Porter, pointed out, he “returned to again and again in his oils, watercolors and ink on paper.” Indeed, the South Meadow was a special place, its scenic beauty attracting not only Porter and his sibling but other members of their family, too, including their mother, Ruth Wadsworth Furness Porter (1875–1942), a lover of poetry and art. As Eliot recalled:
Mother was an indefatigable berry picker, and the strawberries, being first, were the ones she most enjoyed gathering. Her favorite beds were in the South Meadow, from where she could look down from the sloping grass to the Indian shell heaps above the beach, to the dotted rocks and small islands beyond, and on out to the open sea. This meadow had a history of redmens’ feasts, of canoes drawn up into the grass and blazing campfires, and later, of a white man’s farm and his small sailboat anchored off shore ... mother spent many hours in the meadow (Eliot Porter, Summer Island––Penobscot Country [San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1966], p. 46; quoted in Ludman, Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints, p. 107).
Porter focuses on the vista that so captivated his mother in View from the South Meadow, a composition that functions as both a landscape and seascape (The Hirschl & Adler oil is closely related to Porter’s South Meadow, Great Spruce Head Island [1969; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York].) Rendered with simplified forms, lushly flowing brushwork, and a palette wherein luminous pinks and earth tones are balanced and offset by subtle, near-transparent shades of blue, Porter provides us with a highly evocative image that hovers between the real and the abstract. To be sure, in viewing the painting, one gets a sense of place as well as the artist’s intense love of nature vis-à-vis the environment he knew so well.
