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Lot Essay
Ever since he was a child, Fairfield Porter spent the warmer months at his family’s home on Great Spruce Head Island, off the coast of Maine in Penobscot Bay. Porter grew to love the Maine atmosphere, once quoted as saying, “I’ve been to Maine almost every summer since I was six. It’s the place where most of all I feel myself to belong.” (Fairfield Porter’s Maine, Southampton, New York, 1977)
Portraying the rocky shore and coastal islands of the area, High Tide of 1973 reflects the artist’s personal connection with the Maine landscape, while exhibiting the more abstracted aesthetic of his later works. Reducing and simplifying the landforms, what remains is a pure representation of his surroundings. As in all of Porter’s best works, High Tide delights in exploring the line “between a reaction to natural light and a search for invented color.” (K. Moffett, “The Art of Fairfield Porter,” in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, exhibition catalogue, Boston, Massachusetts, 1982, p. 38)
Portraying the rocky shore and coastal islands of the area, High Tide of 1973 reflects the artist’s personal connection with the Maine landscape, while exhibiting the more abstracted aesthetic of his later works. Reducing and simplifying the landforms, what remains is a pure representation of his surroundings. As in all of Porter’s best works, High Tide delights in exploring the line “between a reaction to natural light and a search for invented color.” (K. Moffett, “The Art of Fairfield Porter,” in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, exhibition catalogue, Boston, Massachusetts, 1982, p. 38)