FAIRFIELD PORTER (1907-1975)

American Modernism scholar Patricia Mainardi writes of the present work, "In his large panoramic watercolors, such as Morning Sun over [the] South Meadow, Porter is concerned with sunlight not for a quality which through reflection orders our perceptual experience, but for an almost mystical sense of its power, its identity as fire as energy. Here the sun and its swath upon water are simply not painted—the white of the paper stands for the obliteration and incineration of everything in its path. On the level of virtuosity this is astonishing. It means that the entire watercolor—and it is a medium which does not tolerate corrections or second thoughts—has to be painted towards instead of away from the culminating white of the paper. It is also an extraordinary pictorial invention for portraying an extreme of illumination not ordinarily possible within the scale of value of either paint or vision." ("Fairfield Porter's Contribution to Modernism," Art News, February 1976, p. 108)