?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
CHARLES ETHAN PORTER (1847 - 1923) Sunflowers.
Oil on wood panel, early 1880s. 610x254 mm; 24x10 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: James Clarke Welling and Clementine Dixon Welling, Hartford, CT and Washington, DC; Elizabeth Dixon Welling, West Hartford, CT, thence by descent to the current owner, 1976; private collection.
James Clarke Welling and Clementine Dixon Welling were married in 1882 and divided their time between Washington, DC, where he was president of Columbian University (later renamed George Washington University), and Hartford, where her family lived. James Welling was a close friend of William Corcoran, who was a chief benefactor of the university, and also served as president of the Corcoran School of Art and president of the Board of Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Dixon family lived in Hartford since the 1840s. Clementine Dixon's father was Senator James Dixon, U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1857-1869.
Sunflowers is a dramatic and daring painting by Charles Ethan Porter made during or shortly after his brief, but important, Paris period. In 1881, Porter moved to Paris for approximately two years, where he enrolled at the École Nationale Superiéure des Arts Décoratifs before studying at the Académie Julian, like many American painters. While he unsuccessfully attempted to show his work in the Salon, his still life paintings were infused with a realism greatly influenced by Henri Fantin-Latour and by his experimentation with plein air painting. The large, flourished signature also relates Sunflowers to other known Paris period paintings. Porter painted one other known sunflower in the watercolor Still Life with Corn, circa 1885, with similar abstract elongated forms and compressed space in its composition.
We would like to thank Hildy Cummings, noted Charles Ethan Porter expert and author of the recent monograph, Charles Ethan Porter: African-American Master of Still Life, for her expertise in dating and confirming this work Cummings cat. 35, p. 82.
