A member of the public submitted an online request to Christie’s for an appraisal of a watercolor painting that had long been part of their family’s art collection. The little landscape turned out to be the work of J.M.W. Turner, Britain’s premiere Romantic landscape painter—and it’s heading to auction in New York next month.
Turner Watercolor Poised to Fetch Six Figures in February
A mid-19th-century watercolor—discovered by Christie’s via its online “Request an Estimate” service—has been positively attributed to J.M.W. Turner, Britain’s boldest and most beloved landscape painter. As most of Turner’s paintings and sketches belong to the United Kingdom’s national collection, his work rarely appears on the open art market. Christie’s expects the upcoming sale of the Turner watercolor to “invite competition.”
This particular Turner watercolor has belonged to the family of English collector and engineer Haddon C. Adams for nearly a century. With characteristically expressive swaths of translucent watercolor, it depicts the horizon of a Venetian lagoon amidst an approaching storm. While the work was briefly cataloged as a Turner, it was later attributed to English art critic John Ruskin. According to Christie’s, which reattributed the work to Turner, the watercolor is worth at least ten times more than a Ruskin-made equivalent. The auction house predicts it will fetch between $300,000 and $600,000 at the Old Master and British Drawings Sale in New York on February 4.
Reattributing the Turner Landscape
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterWhen the Turner watercolor was submitted to the auction house for appraisal, “the [submitted] image was poor, and the painting was behind old glass, which had a greenish tint,” explained Rosie Jarvie, a specialist in British drawings and watercolors at Christie’s. However, Jarvie “had an instinct, from the strong brushstrokes, economy of line and the palette, that we really needed to see this properly.”
Additional analysis by specialist historian Peter Bower revealed that the watercolor was made on the same type of paper as many of Turner’s other watercolor views of Venice that belong to the Turner Bequest. Finally, Turner expert Ian Warrell, who penned the catalog essay for the Christie’s auction, attributed the work to the artist’s 1840 visit to Venice, where he produced several such watercolor landscapes.
J.M.W. Turner’s Watercolors
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when J.M.W. Turner was a burgeoning artist of the Romantic era, watercolor was not considered a fine art medium in its own right. Rather, watercolor was relegated to the realms of preparatory sketches and women’s domestic hobbies. Turner, however, not only went on to master the difficult traditional techniques of watercolor painting. He also singlehandedly raised the status of watercolor to a bonafide art medium equal to oil painting—worthy of serious consideration by critics, collectors, and gallery-goers.
Turner held onto most of his watercolors until he died in 1851, at which time they were transferred to the U.K.’s national collection, per the Turner Bequest. A handful of Turner watercolors remained with the artist’s dealer and eventually changed hands. The Christie’s landscape was among the latter.
