Largely self-taught, he produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists; many set in or around the family house on Spruce Head Island, Maine.
His painterly vision which encompassed a fascination with nature and the ability to reveal extraordinariness in ordinary life was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. He said once, "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful."
FairfieldPorter was not one to boast of his ancestry; he rarely mentioned his distinguished relatives and forebears, even later in life to those friends who would have been intrigued by them.
FairfieldPorter grew up rich, but no one in the family cared to discuss where their wealth came from, what could be done with it, or even how much of it there was.
Porter's painterly sensuality — an incredibly particular and American sensuality, one so relaxed and all-embracing that his work is sometimes misconstrued as a thoughtless recording of the commonplace — eventually triumphed in a body of paintings which are among the most significant of twentieth-century realism.
Porter has been named an "intimist" for his admiration for the work of French postimpressionists Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings of the private and personal domestic arena reflected the French middle class and their interest in pushing the impressionist painters' abstraction even further.
Porter was reared in a wealthy family and while as an adult he had some money shortages, he did not have to work for a living.
Porter's disengagement is surely deliberate, as he concentrated on the act of painting rather than on the emotional appeal family and friends might engender.
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