| Maker(s): | Porter, Fairfield
| | Culture: | American (1907 - 1975)
| | Title: | Interior
| | Date Made: | 1951
| | Type: | Painting
| | Materials: | oil on canvasboard
| | Place Made: | United States
| | Measurements: | panel: 18 1/2 in x 15 1/2 in; 46.99 cm x 39.37 cm
| | Narrative Inscription: | signature and date in black oil at lower left: E Porter 51
| | Accession Number: | SC 2012.1.16
| | Credit Line: | Gift of The Pokross Art Collection, donated in accordance with the wishes of Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 by her children, Joan Pokross Curhan, class of 1959, William R. Pokross and David R. Pokross Jr. in loving memory of their parents, Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 and David R. Pokross
| | Museum Collection: | Smith College Museum of Art
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Description:
interior, room with grey paneled walls, oval table with red cloth, bottle, tureen, glass and utensils on it, three gold side chairs, one with gold cloth on it, white milk glass and black wrought iron hanging lamp, woman standing near chair under lamp wearing black blouse and dark gold skirt
Label Text:
Fairfield Porter was a noted twentieth-century American realist painter of landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and interiors, most of which were painted in or around his home in Southampton on Long Island, or at the family’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. Porter first attended Harvard and then studied at the Art Students League in New York. An exhibition of the works of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1939 had a profound effect on him. However, the influence of these two French intimist artists, and particularly of Vuillard, did not appear until after World War II in portraits and interiors Porter painted during 1949 to 1951, the date of the Pokross Interior.
In a 1968 interview for the oral history project of the Archives of American Art, Porter recalled the impact of seeing works by Vuillard in the Chicago exhibition three decades earlier: “I had never seen as many Vuillards before…And I looked at the Vuillards and thought, Maybe it was just a sort of revelation of the obvious, and Why would one think of doing anything else when it’s so natural to do this? When Bill [Willem de Kooning] was first influenced, you know, by modern art, it was Picasso he was emulating. With me it was Vuillard.”
Vuillard’s influence is evident in the Pokross Interior, which has compositional and other similarities to a work such as Vuillard’s Interior with a Hanging Lamp, a color lithograph of 1899. There is a sense of quietude in both works, whose elements consist of a modest table covered by a patterned cloth, a seated female figure, and an overhead lamp, seen from an elevated perspective.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2012.1.16 |
