return ELIOT PORTER (1901-1990) Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) Well educated and gifted, brothers Eliot and Fairfield Porter shared a fascination with nature, the ability to reveal extraordinariness in ordinary life, and a reputation in the American art world as stubborn independents who refused to conform to the methods and practices of their contemporaries. Eliot, influenced by his father, who was an amateur photographer and science enthusiast, is today best known for his ornithological photographs and for his pioneering use of color when black and white was the norm for artistic photography. Fairfield, who adhered to representational subjects during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, claimed that he did so because he had once overheard critic Clement Greenberg tell Willem de Kooning that the concept was passé. This portrait of Eliot was painted just months before the artist's death. It captures the celebrated photographer in a quiet moment on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine's Penobscot Bay, where the brothers had grown up, and documents the sympathetic relationship that they forged later in life. Oil on canvas, 1975 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution NPG.93.25 return