Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
Harold William Brown (acquired from the above)
Roy and Gloria Christopher
By descent to the present owner (their son)

New York, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Fairfield Porter: Paintings, February-March 1965

Joan Ludman, "Checklist of the Paintings by Fairfield Porter," Fairfield Porter: An American Classic, New York, 1992, p. 293
Joan Ludman, Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels, New York, 2001, no. L452, p. 201

Very good condition; unlined; under UV: fine.
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The son of a wealthy architect, Fairfield Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois in 1907. His family's affluence and artistic interests provided Porter with early exposure to Chicago's art world as well as the great galleries of Europe. After graduating from Harvard in 1928, Porter traveled extensively throughout Europe, studying the old masters; however it was the Post-Impressionist exhibition Paintings and Prints by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard (1938-1939) at the Art Institute of Chicago that had the most significant impact on Porter's artistic style. In the intimate, domestic scenes of the French middle class Porter saw what he later called "a sort of revelation of the obvious." He explained: "What I like in Vuillard is that it seems to be ordinary what he's doing, but the extraordinary is everywhere." William Agee notes that Bonnard and Vuillard "gave Porter a grounding and direction he had sorely lacked in his work ... Their message was clear: paint what you know, what is given to you, what is in front of you, and let the painting speak for itself ... They mediated between past and present, offering Porter a way to translate the solid, durable world of old master art into a vital and personal modern art" (in Joan Ludman, Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2001, p. 25). Not long after the Chicago exhibition Porter met Willem de Kooning whose work offered Porter a fresh and modern answer to figura🐓tive painting at a time when many be𝔉lieved the style to be obsolete.

In the 1960s, Porter produced a number of interior scenes containing figures that are considered to be among his finest works. Many of these reveal his deep, personal connection to specific domestic locations, none more important than his home in Maine. When Porter was five, his family acquired the then uninhabited Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay where his father, James, built a large two-story summer home on the island's north end. Fairfield spent nearly every summer of his life at the so called "big house," where he and his guests would while away the days, cut off from the rest of the world. Indoors, painted in 1964, features a lone figure (possibly one of Porter's two sons) reading in the living room of the Maine home. Though the scene is one of everyday domesticity, the proliferation of angles and strong horizontal and vertical lines serve to emphasize the painted surface of the canvas. Though Porter insisted that the subject of a painting should be subordinate to the painting itself, he did recognize the significance of the biographical in his work. Four years after painting Indoors, Porter gav🦩e an interview to Paul Cummings who inquired about the prevalence of interiors in his work. Porter responded: "Well, that's mostly the house in Maine. I paint that perhaps a little more than I do this one [in Southampton, New York]. I think that's because it was built by my father. It's an example of his architecture. And so in a sense if I paint that house in Maine I'm also painting a portrait of my father..." (June 6, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).