Known for his landscape narratives and a color palette influenced by his surroundings in Southampton, New York and Penobscot Bay, Maine, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) had an equally strong career as an artist and critic. Both of Porter's wealthy, socially progressive parents supported the arts, and his father was also a private architect who purchased and built a family home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. On a family trip to Europe at the age of fourteen, Porter discovered a love for Renaissance painting, and four years later, he entered the fine arts program at Harvard University. In 1928, Porter completed his degree and moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League, where his favorite teachers were Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson. Porter remained financially unaffected by the Depression of the 1930s, but politically moved, as he supported the publication Living Marxism with personal funds and illustrated and wrote for Arise, another Marxist publication. In the 1940s, Porter befriended New York's leading abstract expressionist artists, particularly Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and in 1951, after a friendly dispute with Porter over an Arshile Gorky exhibition, Elaine suggested he take over her monthly column at Art News. Porter stayed there for seven years, and in 1959, he began writing art criticism for The Nation. Porter's criticism has been praised for its sensitivity to the diverse trends in the New York art world and its refusal to tell artists how to paint. His painting earned him respect and admiration from his fellow artists, but critics were less open-minded, and it was not until the mid-1960s, when abstract expressionism was declared to be dead, that Porter's figural painting began to get the attention it deserved.

Porter's favorite statement about painting came from Henri Matisse: "Every corner of the canvas should be alive;" and our featured work, Daffodils and Pear Tree (1973), exemplifies this belief. Here, Porter reveals his particular deftness at using figural representation as a vehicle for the kind of exploration of color and line more readily associated with abstraction. A pulsating spring landscape is also a study in greens, yellows, browns, and blues. Color delineates forms of plant life at various stages of life - daffodils in full bloom, lush grass, shrubs, trees that have only begin to sprout leaves, and the tall evergreen pines ubiquitous in the sandy soils of Long Island and Maine. But the forms themselves allow us to see and appreciate the multiple tones and hues within a single color. The bright green of the newly sprung grass is unique to that field, flecked with blue and yellow and appearing in none of the other vegetation. As our eyes descend to the slanting vertical of the pine, its color changes and blends with the surrounding trees whose light brown branches can barely conceal the yellows and greens that push through like spring buds. Not even the sky is a uniform blue, as it seems to pick up and reflect the tones in the plants below it. Finally, a small patch of blue interrupts the flow of grass, linking sky, water, and earth, and revealing that it is not just the colors and subject matter that animate this canvas, but the very composition. Porter's Daffodils and Pear Tree allows us to see the dynamism of spring through the vitality of artistic representation.