Boy Reading,

1955

In addition to his career as a painter and printmaker, Fairfield Porter also contributed insightful art criticism to <em>The Nation</em> and served as an editor at <em>ARTnews</em>. Following study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York and travel in Europe, Porter’s own work was profoundly influenced by the French Intimistes Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, whose work he saw in 1938 at an exhibition in Chicago. Their sophisticated color relations and emphasis on quiet domestic interiors provided a model for Porter’s portrayals of friends and relatives in familiar settings at homes on Long Island and the family’s summer compound at Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. <em>Boy Reading</em> is a particularly sensitive example of Porter’s early maturity, before the introduction, around that time, of broad swaths of more vivid color, which focused attention on the abstract qualities of his still fundamentally realist imagery. The Princeton painting maintains the equilibrium of his most effective works, depicting an appealingly cluttered interior with emphasis on both the human figure and its surroundings, rendered in a manner that mediates between passages of quasi-abstract pictorial space and overall resolution into a representational totality.