?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
CHARLES ETHAN PORTER (1847 - 1923) Butterflies and Flowers.
Gouache and watercolor on wove paper, circa 1878. 228x152 mm; 9x6 inches (image). Signed in pencil, lower center.
Provenance: Sacks Fine Art, New York; private collection, New York.
This beautiful pair of monarch butterflies is a very scarce example of Charles Ethan Porter's trompe l'oeil painting. Hildegarde Cummings describes how Porter exhibited similar works depicting butterflies, moths, flies and other insects at the art gallery A. D. Vorce in Hartford, CT in 1878. These realist works were enthusiastically received in the local press - but no later insect works are known after 1879. Cummings pp. 38-40.
