Charles Ethan Porter

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Charles Ethan Porter (c. 1847 - March 6, 1923), was an African American still life painter.

Porter was born in or about 1847 in Hartford, Connecticut. His family moved to the nearby village of Rockville (now part of Vernon, Connecticut) by the early 1850s. In the 1870s, his father built a house there. He graduated from the local high school in 1865.

In 1869, after two years of art study at Wesleyan Academy (now known as the Wilbraham & Monson Academy) in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Porter went on to study at New York's National Academy of Design and was one of the first African Americans to exhibit at the Academy.

In 1878, he opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut. When he traveled to Paris several years later, he took with him a letter of recommendation from Mark Twain.

He was in France from late 1881 to early 1884, probably studying at times at the Academie Julian. He spent several months in the French countryside as well, including the village of Fleury, near Barbizon. Porter returned to the U.S. and worked in Hartford and New York City.

He left Hartford for Rockville in 1889, where he briefly had a studio in the Fitch Block and afterward at the remains of a tower on Fox Hill, which a family member owned.

At times from 1890 to 1896 he also had a studio in New York City. Later, his fortunes declined, possibly because of health issues and certainly because of mounting racism nationwide, and he sold his paintings door-to-door in Rockville, Connecticut, where he died in 1923 in virtual obscurity, around the age of 75.

In recent years, Porter has been rediscovered and is now remembered as the creator of minor masterpieces of American still life painting. He is most famous for fruit and floral still life.