Family
Relationship with his father/”The Big House” on Great Spruce head Island
Benjamin Demott “Culture Watch” Atlantic April 1976 “Unified Man”
Throwing up his hands he explained: “He’s here in the room—my father. I like it. When I’m painting he’s very close by.”
Porter had “…a desire to keep his father, long gone, with him over the full length of his journey. The elder Porter, a Chicago architect who made a fortune young, lived for a time amid the suburban opulence of the day. (Fairfield once told me with a grin that he’d been unimpressed as a boy, on his first trip abroad with his Dad, by the Europe of palaces, great houses, Old Masters, and the rest, “I thought they were just imitating Chicago, my father’s friends’ places.”) p. 111
Grace Glueck “Nature—With Manners” NYTIMES January 19, 1969
Porter quoted: “Father’s houses were commodious, marvelously built, and had an esthetic quality. He had a great influence on me. When I paint the living room of the house in Maine, as I do again and again, I feel I’m making a portrait of him.”
T.S. Eliot
“(Tradition)…cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”