Turner's Rome, from Mount Aventine goes on view before £50m sale

Sotheby's has put J.M.W. Turner's Rome, from Mount Aventine (1836) on public view at the Palazzo Rondinini in Rome, ahead of its sale in London on December 9. The auction house estimates the painting at around £50m, or $66.2 million.

That figure would beat the current auction record for Turner, which the same canvas set in 2014. It sold at Sotheby's London that year for £30.3 million including fees, twelve years before this sale. The painting would be breaking its own record.

The exhibition is short: the Palazzo Rondinini, an 18th-century baroque residence in Rome built by an art collector, is hosting the canvas for three days, through October 1. Sotheby's says it is the most valuable work it has ever shown in Italy.

What the painting shows

The canvas shows an umbrella pine set against the winding river Tiber, with the city bathed in soft, golden light and stretching into the distance. Sotheby's believes Turner conceived and mapped out the picture in Italy, then completed it in London.

Sotheby's also stresses its condition. The house describes an extraordinary state of preservation and an astonishing freshness, and says the wet paint still records the artist's fingerprints, palette knife scrapes and single hairs shed by his brushes.

The work has never been relined or restored. It remains on its original canvas and in its original frame, across the 191 years since it was painted. For a picture of this scale and age, that is the detail specialists will weigh most closely.

Julian Gascoigne, senior specialist in British paintings at Sotheby's London, said few paintings capture Turner's genius so completely. He called it a work of extraordinary ambition, beauty and innovation, made at the height of Turner's powers and one that has come to define the course of modern painting.

Who owned it before

Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, Turner's friend and patron, commissioned the painting. Some four decades later it was bought by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery and a future British prime minister, as a wedding gift for Hannah de Rothschild.

De Rothschild was then the wealthiest woman in Britain. The sources differ on the year of that purchase, giving 1876 and 1878. One gives the price as £6,142, which it puts at about £636,165 in today's money.

The Rosebery family held the painting for more than 130 years before the 2014 sale. Its buyer was described by Gascoigne only as a distinguished private collection, and the sources do not say who owns it now or who is selling.

Provenance moves prices at Sotheby's well beyond paintings. When we ranked the most expensive jewelry ever sold, jewels once owned by Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth Taylor sold for many times their estimates, and the Pink Star diamond brought $71.2 million there in 2017.

Why the estimate is higher

Rarity drives the number. Gascoigne says the vast majority of late Turners are in museums, so he could count on one hand the late masterpieces in private hands, and he ranks this among the greatest of them.

In the twelve years since it last sold, he says, no Turner of its calibre has come to market. He adds that it could hang with a contemporary collection as easily as beside works of its own period.

Gascoigne also sees a chance an institution might enter the bidding. Sotheby's is the same house that sold the 1933 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle for $18,872,250 in 2021, a price we recorded when we ranked the most valuable coins.

After Rome, the painting travels to Sotheby's galleries in London, Hong Kong and New York. The house cites high interest in Turner among Asian clients, and a substantial presence for the artist in American collections.

It returns to Sotheby's New Bond Street gallery in London for display before the Old Masters and 19th-century evening sale on December 9, which the Turner leads. Sotheby's has not disclosed a reserve, and the sale is where the £50m estimate will be tested.