Fairfield Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois , the son of a wealthy architect. A realistic artist, he is best known for his landscapes and sunlit views of interiors, although he also did portraits and still lifes. His work is often described as modernized American impressionist.

After receiving a degree from Harvard University, he took formal art training from 1928 to 1930, and studied with Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York City.  In later life, Porter divided his time between his home in South Hampton on Long Island and cottage on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, where he painted images that reflected his comfortable life as a country dweller, and his appreciation of the effects of nature.

Porter did his best work during the last fifteen years of his life. His style loosened somewhat, and he incorporated more abstract forms and colors and recorded a freer and more immediate impression of his subjects. Porter combined a soft, pastel palette with a broad brushstroke. He strove for a freshness and vitality similar to the abstract painters of his generation, but they are grounded in a less theoretical, more realistic approach. Porter’s oil paintings are immediate, sensual impressions of the world directly before him, unconstrained by any adherence to a particular theory.

In addition to his work as an artist, Porter was also a writer, publishing art critiques in major art journals throughout the 1940s and 1950s, as well as a monograph about Thomas Eakins in 1959. Porter gained much respect and fame for both his painting and writing and continued to enjoy and prolific career and financial success until his death in 1975.

 Blue Hill Bay Gallery   11 Tenney Hill, Blue Hill, Maine 04614