Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)

James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet, whose work The Morning of the Poem received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. Fairfield Porter painted several portraits of his good friend Schuyler and eventually invited the poet to move in with the Porter family in Southampton in 1961 where Schuyler would remain until 1973.

Barry Schwabsky writes of the present work, “His sitters’ muted personalities…seem enclosed in a kind of privileged privacy, an intimate stillness, which is also characteristic of his view of landscape. This is particularly well conveyed by a 1960 portrait of Jimmy Schuyler, in which the poet, sitting in an armchair in the midst of trees, seems almost to merge with the ambient.” (B. Schwabsky, “Fairfield Porter,” Arts, November 1985)