Charles Ethan Porter
1847–1923 · American still life painter
Charles Ethan Porter (Hartford, Connecticut, 1847 - Rockville, 1923) was an American painter best known for still lifes and one of the first African Americans to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York. He matters because he was the only African American artist of his era to paint still lifes.
After a childhood marked by poverty and the loss of several siblings, Porter studied in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and in 1869 entered the National Academy of Design, where he stayed until 1873. There he began exhibiting and winning praise. He settled in Hartford in 1878 and painted most of his still lifes there: fruit, often without tableware and with unusual touches such as insects, and especially apples, which sold well.
In 1879 the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church bought his works and encouraged him to paint landscapes. Between 1881 and 1884 he studied in Europe, mainly in Paris, without achieving the sales he hoped for. After returning to New York and Hartford, he settled permanently in Rockville in 1897. His quality declined after 1900, and his work was largely forgotten until historians revived interest in the 1980s. His first museum exhibition took place in 2008, and his paintings now belong to public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art.