Early Years

The Parrish Art Museum

William Merritt Chase

Fairfield Porter

Search Entire Collection

The Fairfield Porter Collection and Archives

Fairfield Porter was the most important American realist painter from 1949 until his death in 1975. Not coincidentally, these were the years when Porter lived in Southampton, and in 1979, his estate recognized the bond between the artist and the Museum by donating some 250 works to the Parrish collection.

Porter was both a gifted painter and an accomplished writer who produced some of the most lucid art criticism and commentary of the time, notably his reviews for the magazine Art News. He insisted that he painted what he saw rather than what he might assume to be there. Porter painted what he was familiar with--his family and friends and the places he lived and visited, including Southampton and a family-owned island off the coast of Maine where he had summered since childhood.

Writing about the intimate interior paintings of the French artists Vuillard and Bonnard, Porter found that in their work that recorded the ordinary "…the extraordinary is everywhere." An artist who steadfastly maintained a figurative vision, he knew and admired many Abstract Expressionist artists here on the East End, especially Willem de Kooning. Porter once wrote: "The realist thinks he knows ahead of time what reality is, and the abstract artist what art is, but it is in its formality that realist art excels, and the best abstract art communicates an overwhelming sense of reality."

Click on a thumbnail to view images in the gallery.