Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter
Anne, 1965

Worn paths bring home the children
From tidal water on a summer evening
Across the island below the sky
--Fairfield Porter, from The Island in the Evening, Poetry, March 1955

Jesse's doctor and good friend, Ken Wright, was an amateur painter as well as a neighbor and friend of the American painter Fairfield Porter, who lived in Southampton at 49 S. Main Street from 1949 until his death in 1975.

Fairfield Porter

Snow - South Main Street, c 1972

After Jesse's retirement from McCormick in May, 1952, and upon his return to Southampton, he painted with Wright and Porter until his death in 1954.

Jesse Halsey
49 North Main Street, c 1953

"The Southampton of 1949 was quite different from the Southampton of today, a busy beach community overrun by day-trippers and filled with year-round vacation homes. But contemporary Southampton is, if less tranquil, at least somewhat more cosmopolitan . . . Apart from its summer colony, Southampton Village was known as the seat of Southampton township, a quiet potato-farming community and home to the local hospital. It was graced with examples of early American architecture, for the area had been settled in the second half of the seventeenth century, and thanks to the mild climate and lack of an expanding economy, many of the old buildings remained just as they had always been. The permanent population consisted of farmers, shopkeepers, doctors at the regional hospital, and retired people of independent means. While picturesque, the town was also racist, xenophobic, and—perhaps because of the influence of the affluent summer colony and a small group of families whose ancestors dated back to the founding of the settlement in 1648—exceptionally class-conscious."

--Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, Justin Spring, Yale University Press, p. 175.

Helen Halsey Haroutunian
Birch Trees, c 1954