Ernest Charton

Ernest Marc Jules Charton Thiessen de Treville, known professionally as Ernest Charton, was born on 22 March 1816 in Sens, in the Yonne region of France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, though the exact years of his enrollment are not documented in available sources, and traveled in Italy and Spain before turning toward Latin America.

He arrived in Chile with his family in 1843 and became active in Santiago, painting portraits, city views, and historical scenes. He traveled to Ecuador in 1849, where he taught drawing and painting at the University of Quito and directed the Liceo de Pintura "Miguel de Santiago," a precursor to Ecuador's national school of fine arts. He continued on to Peru in 1851 and Panama in 1852, returned briefly to France, and then resettled in Valparaiso, Chile, from 1855. In 1870 he crossed the Andes into Argentina and settled in Buenos Aires, where he remained until his death on 7 December 1877. A sale of works from his studio was held in Buenos Aires the following year, on 16 December 1878.

Beyond oil painting, Charton worked in pastel and, at points in his career, in early photography; an album of roughly 190 salted paper prints connected to his work has appeared at auction. His subjects, panoramic port cities, Andean landscapes, historical portraits, and scenes of popular religious life, place him within the nineteenth century tradition of the peintre voyageur, the traveling artist who recorded new geographies for European and Latin American audiences alike.

Charton's standing rests largely on exhibition history and museum inclusion rather than on a documented body of contemporary press criticism. He showed in the Sociedad de Instruccion Primaria's fine arts exhibitions in Santiago in 1854, 1856, and 1858, receiving a second class painting medal in 1856, and again in an 1877 exhibition at the Palacio del Congreso in Santiago. His reputation was reaffirmed through the twentieth century in surveys of Chilean art, including a 1940 exhibition in Buenos Aires, a 1954 homage to Pablo Neruda at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the 1969 Panorama de la Pintura Chilena at the same museum, and a 1970 exhibition, Valparaiso en la Pintura, in the port city he painted repeatedly. Scholarship on his work, notably by art historian Marta Penhos, situates him within the category of the "artista viajero," or traveling artist, whose choice of subjects was shaped by a Romantic interest in the exotic and the picturesque. No verbatim critical assessment from a major press outlet, as opposed to academic or institutional writing, could be confirmed in available sources.

Charton's auction market is small and uneven. The highest figure found in public sources is EUR 384,000 for a work titled Panorama de Valparaiso, reported sold on 23 June 2018 in Blois, France and described by that source as a world record for the artist; the auction house itself is not named. Separately, Christie's London sold a panoramic view of Valparaiso in 2015 for approximately USD 315,739 to 315,839 depending on source, well above a presale estimate of USD 107,030 to 152,900. Whether the Blois and Christie's results describe two distinct paintings or the same work reported inconsistently could not be confirmed from available sources, and both figures should be treated with caution until traced to a primary auction record.

Below that tier, results are modest. A view of Quito, Ecuador realized USD 39,650 at an Arader Galleries American and European Art sale on 24 January 2015. General price guide data places his paintings in a range of roughly EUR 6,800 to 320,000 and his drawings in the low hundreds to low thousands of euros, consistent with a market driven by a handful of exceptional panoramic works rather than steady turnover.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Ernest Charton and no gallery or estate currently representing him or his work as of 2026; pieces surface through auction houses, including Christie's and regional French houses, and through the museum record rather than a primary market. Attribution and condition should be checked against museum provenance and auction cataloguing rather than any centralized authentication body. The two reported figures for a Valparaiso panorama, EUR 384,000 from a 2018 Blois sale and USD 315,739 from a 2015 Christie's London sale, have not been reconciled to a single confirmed work, and either should be verified against the originating auction house before being used as a valuation benchmark. Outside that top tier, his market is thin and topographic in subject, meaning individual results can vary widely depending on the specific city or sitter depicted.