Charcoal on wove paper, 1944. 610x460 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated in charcoal, lower right.
With a pencil drawing of a physics diagram from Howard University on the verso. This early drawing depicts the artist's daughter in an experimental cross-hatch technique.
Provenance: Ex-collection the artist, hence by descent to his daughter, Constance Porter-Uzelac.
Illustrated: A History of African-American Artists, Romare Bearden and Harry B. Henderson, Jr., p. 375.
Porter painted and drew many family portraits. Born in Baltimore, Maryland,he grewing up in the District of Columbia where he entered Howard University's School of Applied Sciences on an art scholarship in the fall of 1923 under the tutelage of James V. Herring, the founder of the new university, and graduating in 1927. He attended Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Art Students League, New York, where he studied painting under Dimitri Romanovsky and drawing under George Bridgman, the leading anatomical expert. Porter entered the Harmon Foundation Exhibitions in New York, and was awarded the Arthur Schomberg Portrait Prize for the painting Woman Holding A Jug in 1933. In 1943, his classic book, Modern Negro Art was published by the Dryden Press. In the winter of 1992, it was reprinted with a new introduction by David C. Driskell. Driskell states "Porter's book places African American artists in the context of modern art history, which was both novel and profound. . .Porter's bold and perceptive scholarship helped those who subsequently focused their attention on African American expression in the visual arts to see the wealth of work that had been produced in the United States for over two centuries."
