Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923)
Strawberries, 1888
Oil on canvas, 12 x 16”
Signed and dated lower right

Done after Porter studied in France, this painting recalls one that this African-American artist painted a decade earlier. He had studied and exhibited at the National Academy of Design and painted in New York City before settling in Hartford in 1878. His meticulously detailed fruit paintings had dazzled Hartford then.

Porter’s art was impressionistic just after his return from Paris in 1884. Hartford, however, preferred the earlier still lifes. This painting must have been done to please. It is lightly edited--fewer berries and leaves--but otherwise a near twin to the 1870s painting.