Based in Rockville and Hartford, Connecticut, for most of his career, Charles Ethan Porter specialized in still-life painting in the late 19th century. He was one of the first African Americans to study and exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York. While he also painted landscapes, Porter is best known for floral and fruit compositions. In the 1880s, he brought a modern French approach to still-life painting after study in Paris.
Raised in Rockville, Connecticut, Porter spent about a year studying painting at Wesleyan Academy before he was accepted at one of the nation’s leading art schools, the National Academy of Design in New York, where he studied from 1869 to 1873. Porter lived in New York and spent summers in Rockville until late in 1877, when he set up a studio in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford had a vibrant artistic scene at the time, with resident artists like Frederic Church and wealthy collectors including Daniel Wadsworth and Mrs. Samuel Colt. Porter’s still-life paintings soon attracted notice in the local papers. He was working in a meticulously detailed, trompe l’oeil manner, depicting flowers or fruits, sometimes visited by equally realistic insects. His still-life groupings were simply composed—often just a single type of fruit or flower—and free of fancy tableware or exotic specimens.
A studio sale of Porter’s paintings in 1881 earned him about $1000 to travel to Paris. He went there with letters of introduction from Hartford’s leading citizens, including Samuel Clemens, and he enrolled at the École Nationale Supériere des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian. In the summer of 1882, Porter traveled to Fleury, close to Barbizon, where he painted landscapes, but his fruit and flower pictures were the works most admired in France, just as they had been in the U.S. In Paris, Porter lived just a few doors down from one of the leading French still-life painters, Henri Fantin-Latour, and first-hand exposure to the French artist’s paintings probably encouraged Porter to work in a looser, more painterly style.
Early in 1884 Porter was back in Hartford. The local press supported his work, praising it as even better now that he incorporated “the mode of treatment which is so characteristic of French art today.” His “broader, freer style” was contrasted favorably to his earlier “dainty, almost finicky” work, yet he had trouble selling enough work to support himself in Hartford and moved between New York and his family home for several years, before settling permanently in Rockville around 1900. He exhibited in all three cities and in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Porter’s network included local White artists as well as his extended family, but he struggled to make a living as an artist in a small and artistically conservative community—a struggle made much more challenging for Porter as a Black artist. Porter exhibited and sold regularly, as well as teaching, through the early 20th century, and he seems to have been quite prolific—news reports indicate him selling hundreds of works at a time in studio sales—but his struggles are also clear.
