Fairfield Porter is an artist best known for his sincere and intimate portrayals of the people and places closest to him. While Fairfield’s soft-focus interpretations and lush creamy color palettes were constants, his subject matter varied dramatically from landscapes and cityscapes to portraits and interiors or architectural studies. Fairfield was most active between the 1930s and 1970s, during a period when the art world was most engaged by Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, an interest bolstered by Clement Greenberg’s pivotal 1961 broadcast and later text, Modernist Painting. While Fairfield was impressed by the work of his friend, Willem de Kooning, and others, his work was primarily influenced by the French Intimiste painters, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, separating him from the dominant discourse of the time. Consistently, Fairfield was a vocal supporter of representation, so much so, that critics now consider him a link between the Social Realist Movement of the 1920-30s and the Neo-Expressionists of the 1970-80s. As both a critic and as a painter, Fairfield professed the validity in pursuing work informed by lived experiences. In one statement he declared, “subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after, so much as simply happening to one.” In another, he asserted that “the truest order is what you already find there, or that will be given if you don’t try for it. When you arrange, you fail.” In both, he defends representation for its attempts to honor the spaces we inhabit or the relationships we nurture daily, rather than take them for granted, or consider there to be something more profoundly worthy of our expression. For most of his professional and personal life, Fairfield Porter split his time between South Hampton, New York, and Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. These locations held personal significance, and frequently became the subject or backdrop of his best-known works.