Still Life with Corn
Charles Ethan Porter
ca. 1880 · Watercolor on paper · The American Wing
Trained in New York and Paris and based primarily in Connecticut, Porter was among the first professional African American artists to exhibit his work nationally and to specialize in the still-life genre. This distinctive watercolor—an uncontained autumnal cornucopia of a sunflower, ear of corn, and apple—is rendered in a highly compressed space. While the soft, calligraphic application of background pigment distinguishes the work from Porter’s more meticulous watercolors, this scene of nature’s bounty similarly evokes the earlier example of the American Pre-Raphaelites and their philosophy of Ruskinian “fidelity to nature.”
- Artist
- Charles Ethan Porter
- Date
- ca. 1880
- Medium
- Watercolor on paper
- Culture
- American
- Department
- The American Wing
- Credit line
- Purchase, Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund and Cordelia and Jesse Zanger and Bonnie Johnson Sacerdote Foundation Gifts, 2016
