Artist Fairfield Porter was twenty years older than John Ashbery (born 1927) and the other New York School poets of the 1950s. Porter bonded with the younger generation because he found them sympathetic and inclined to his view that there needed to be a quieter, more introspective aesthetic—a counterpoint to the noisy self-assertion of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Mischievously, Porter said, “I want to do everything that avant-garde theoreticians say you can’t do.” This meant a concentration on the figure and the landscape. Porter wasn’t a reactionary; otherwise he would not have been sympathetic to John Ashbery’s elliptical, elusive, and dreamlike poetry. In this portrait, Porter depicts Ashbery slouched on the couch, head in hand, thinking perhaps about a poem.