The poet James Schuyler described Interior with a Dress Pattern as “a real marvel of quiet beauties”.

“I think I learned a lot from that de Hooch-Balthus picture.” 

Schuyler Diaries July 30, 1969

Balthus also referenced the work of earlier painters. His young girl’s head is almost an exact quotation from Caravaggio.

But The Mirror was not solely motivated by Porter’s love for a masterpiece from Western European art.

The ARTnews cover reproduced Paul Georges’s The Studio, a ten-foot-high self-portrait with nude model.

James Schuyler describes a disagreement he and Fairfield had about the quality of a friend’s art criticism, then goes on to say:

Anyhow everything’s OK now and we made it up by carrying a two ton mirror from my room to the studio so he can paint a self-portrait. Since he has always been averse to doing this you may wonder why the change. A glance at the cover of the current ARTnews explains all.

Letter from James Schuyler to John Ashbery   January 15, 1966  Published in  Just the Thing:  Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-1991      Edited by William Corbett

In September 1931, Fairfield Porter left New York for an extended stay in Europe. The first two months of his journey were spent touring northern Italy with his mother. In Milan they saw Leonardo’s Last Supper. In Padua, they visited the church of Eremitani to see Mantegna’s frescoes.  But it was Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel that had the most dramatic impact on Porter.  He returned repeatedly to see them.  Until the end of his life he kept reproductions of Giotto’s work on the walls of his studios. 

Porter and his mother travelled to Venice, Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Urbino, Arezzo and finally Florence which served as their base while taking day trips in Tuscany.

Ruth Porter returned to Illinois at the end of October. Porter, now on his own, intended to continue his travels and to make copies in the museums. 

The first copy he undertook was of Raphael’s La Donna Gravida in the Palazzo Pitti.

He went on to study a Pesellino, writing to his mother: “I am now copying Pesellino in the Uffizi and doing it badly but learning a good deal”.

Since I saw you I painted a large (6 by 5 feet) painting of Katie standing in the living room before the windows, in a posture like Velasquez’ infantas. It has more glow than I usually, or perhaps have ever, got.

Letter to Howard Griffin   June 12, 1960  Material Witness  

Contemporary art was not part of the fine arts curriculum at Harvard nor was it exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. When students complained about this , “(Paul) Sachs challenged them to create a gallery themselves” thus prompting the founding of Harvard’s  Society for Contemporary Art. Porter had graduated by the time the society was established.  But he had been able to pursue his interest in contemporary American painting thanks to the encouragement of Professor Arthur Pope.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was well known as a painter and an illustrator.  Many of Harvard’s fine arts students were enthusiastic about his work.  When Porter  mentioned to Professor Pope, that he intended to write an essay about  Kent to fulfill a course requirement,  Pope arranged for him to visit the home of John T. Spaulding of Boston to see his art collection which included one of Kent’s paintings.  Porter described that visit in a letter to his mother:

The range and intensity of Rockwell Kent’s use of blue also influenced Porter.

The color blue was important enough to him that he wrote a poem about it: A Painter Obsessed By Blue.

Another likely influence on a young Porter was “The Boston School” of Impressionist painters. He was certainly familiar with their work. He even had a Tarbell portrait available to study. Anne Porter wrote to her mother in 1933 describing a portrait Fairfield had painted :

The figure sits in a chair with its hands in its lap (a position a little like Tarbell’s portrait of you). Spike p. 47

In his 1968 interview with Paul Cummings, Porter looked back on his affection for John Marin:

I don’t know how much I like his pictures, but I can’t ever get over the memory of how much he meant to me at one time.

Harold Weston was, like Dove and Marin, drawn to the challenge of applying a modernist vocabulary to traditional subjects.

Mexican painters who rose to prominence in the 1930s also influenced Porter. In 1940, he wrote to his mother-in-law to thank her for the gift of a book on Mexican Art. He went on to say: “I am glad they produced in color Tamayo’s Pretty Girl, which is at the moment one of my favorite pictures.” A favorite painting from any point in an artist’s life makes a permanent impression, with the potential to, consciously or unconsciously, influence later work.

Porter’s mature work reflected his assimilation of this advice. He also learned from Tiepolo his mastery of “…rare pastel harmonies and nuances of tint…”.

Fairfield Porter’s admiration for Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) is well known.

An obvious commonality between these two painters is their subject matter: scenes from their domestic life, interiors and portraits of friends.

In January 1962 ARTnews published Vuillard Paints a Portrait. The article focused on Vuillard’s Portrait of Anna De Noailles from 1932. The article’s subtitle explains: “A witness to the artist’s immensely complicated methods describes how Vuillard painted the poetess Anna Noailles.” Fairfield Porter’s July Interior, a portrait of Anne in the summer of 1964 when she was sick with hepatitis is very likely his response to Portrait of Anna De Noailles.

Scenes illuminated by artificial light were an appealing challenge to both men.

To fully understand Porter’s admiration for Vuillard, one must be familiar with his unconventional assessment of the artist’s contribution to the evolution of Western European painting.  In his ARTnews review of MOMA’s 1954 Vuillard exhibition Porter summarized his point of view:

For this reviewer Vuillard’s significance is double; first, he did what Cézanne wanted to do, made of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art of the museums, by unifying the Impressionist shimmer into a single object, instead of like Cézanne denying the essence of the shimmer by changing it into planes to express solidity.  Secondly, Vuillard was the artist who most profoundly expressed in visual terms the Third Republic.  We have not yet caught up with the extreme sophistication of his successes. (The entire review can be found in Art In Its Own Terms.)

In an April 1956 review of a Bonnard exhibition (Art In Its Own Terms), Porter describes what appeals to him about the artist. It comes close to being a self-portrait.

He (Bonnard) was intellectual and erotic; he liked to see things in an unusual light: in discussions with his friends he had a reputation for being contradictory and argumentative. The pleasure that his paintings give comes from the love affairs that he observes. Dishes of fruit are not likely to overlap, they are more likely to just touch. A chair back caresses the frame, another the chair rail. His paintings are full of the tenderest tangencies.

Equally applicable to Porter is his emphatic opening statement: Pierre Bonnard was more original than he was credited with being.

In his 1952 review of a Jane Freilicher exhibition, Porter spoke directly to the topic of how a painter might take inspiration from the work of other artists. He wrote: “Her painting is traditional and radical. She is consciously imitative of the masters of the Renaissance, but in a first-hand way.” Porter comes back to this theme in the September 1956 issue of ARTnews. In Jane Freilicher Paints a Picture, he describes how she paints a portrait of a man who is seated before her, saying that she was using Ingres’s portrait of Mme. Riviere “in the back of her mind, but only as a precedent.” This would seem to be an excellent summary of his own process.