Exceptional Works: Fairfield Porter

Iced Coffee, 1966

“For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.”

—Peter Schjeldahl, art critic, 2000

Fairfield Porter

Iced Coffee, 1966

Oil on canvas

79 x 79 3/8 inches (200.7 x 201.6 cm)

Framed: 86 x 86 inches (218.4 x 218.4 cm)

Suffused with gentle afternoon light, Iced Coffee (1966) by Fairfield Porter is at once a double portrait, an interior scene, and a landscape painting of the spruce trees and grass behind the house. Among the most celebrated American figurative painters, Porter (1907–1975) is best known for his formally complex, unsentimental depictions of the people and places integral to his daily life.

Fairfield Porter painting in the woods in Maine, 1975. Courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Porter studied fine art at Harvard in 1928 before moving to New York City, where he studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. His 1938 encounter with the intimate decorative interiors and colors of the French post-impressionist painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard—two of the founding members of the group Les Nabis—in Chicago imparted lessons on directness and close observation that Porter would explore in earnest a decade later. At the same time, his friendship with Willem de Kooning, whose work he admired and wrote on often, started to inform a looser and more energetic style.

When he began exhibiting regularly in the 1950s, Porter’s paintings demonstrated a sophisticated synthesis of the Nabis’ aesthetic sensibilities and abstract expressionism’s all-over consideration of the canvas and gestural application of pigment.

Eliot, Fairfield, Nancy, Edward, and John Porter, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, July 1942. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of Eliot Porter

“The realist thinks he knows ... what reality is, and the abstract artist what art is, but it is in its formality that realist art excels, and the best abstract art communicates an overwhelming sense of reality.”

—Fairfield Porter

Porter spent most of his career living and working in Southampton, Long Island, where he and his wife, the renowned poet Anne Channing Porter, moved in 1949, and at his family’s house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, where Porter had summered since the age of six. “It is my home more than any other place,” he said of Great Spruce Head, “and I belong there.” Despite leaving New York, Porter maintained close ties to the city and to the poets of the New York School, among them John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, and James Schuyler. Porter was also a respected and prolific art critic, contributing regularly to such publications as ARTnews (1951–1959) and The Nation (1959–1961). Open and familial, the house on Great Spruce Head Island became something of a retreat for the circle of liberal intelligentsia of which Porter was a part.

Fairfield Porter, Iced Coffee, 1966 (detail)

In Iced Coffee, Porter paints his daughter Elizabeth, next to his friend and lover, the poet James Schuyler, in a tranquil moment on the back screened porch of the house in Maine, which served as his studio every summer. Schuyler lived with Porter and his family from 1961 to 1973 and was a fixture in their day-to-day lives. Porter first met Schuyler in 1952, as he was becoming close to the New York School of poets. Following his mental collapse in the spring of 1961, the poet moved into the Porters’ Hamptons home and lived with them until 1973.

Both Elizabeth and Schuyler are frequent subjects in Porter’s paintings and appear together in Jimmy and Liz (c. 1963; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) and The Screen Porch (1964; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Schuyler often read aloud to Porter as he painted, as seen in these three paintings. Iced Coffee belongs to a small group of square-format and life-size eighty-by-eighty-inch compositions that represent a period in which Porter began working at a larger scale.

Porter’s paintings operate not on the level of the symbolic, but the literal. In Iced Coffee’s casual yet measured composition, the vase of freshly cut wildflowers in the foreground and the glass of iced coffee poised on the table capture the “presentness” that defines Porter’s practice. The work’s title emphasizes the scene’s everyday quality, evoking the ritual comfort of idle summer afternoons spent on the porch. “It’s a mistake to think Porter was simply painting his lifestyle,” the artist and writer Rob Colvin has observed. “Rather, he committed himself to what Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri Matisse had: to attend to the vitality of everyday things.”

“[For Iced Coffee] I wanted to do a big painting and wanted to have figures in it, and that was the easiest thing to do. The light was pretty good…. I could get it the proper distance, and I could do it just straight from the models. As for what it is, it just means this environment to me.”

—Fairfield Porter

Installation view, The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein, David Zwirner, New York, 2026

“The rhythm ... of the sequential visual response required of the viewer is set not by the subject/layout of the scene [in Iced Coffee], but by the considered disposition of loose brushy open forms and the sober accents of careful planar construction. Sparing use of idiosyncratic detail, a red banded sport sock, a grey sneaker, is made to establish an indivisible unity of emotional tone and coloristic structure.”

—Dennis Adrian, writing about Iced Coffee in a 1967 review of Porter’s show at Tibor de Nagy, New York

Fairfield Porter, Iced Coffee, 1966 (detail)

“As the wholeness of life eludes control, so the wholeness of art eludes the control of the artist.”

—Fairfield Porter

The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein