Key facts
- JMW Turner's painting 'Rome, From Mount Aventine' is returning to Rome for a brief display.
- The painting is expected to fetch £50 million at a Sotheby's auction on December 9.
- It last sold in 2014 for £30.3 million, a record for the artist at the time.
- The artwork depicts Rome's Tiber River as seen from the Aventine Hill.
- The painting remains on its original canvas and frame, with Turner's marks still visible.
- The painting has only exchanged hands twice since its commission in the late 1820s.
JMW Turner's painting 'Rome, From Mount Aventine,' described as his "great love letter" to the city, is set to be auctioned by Sotheby's in London on December 9. The artwork, which last sold for £30.3 million in 2014, is expected to fetch £50 million, potentially setting a new record for the artist. The painting will be displayed in Rome, Hong Kong, and New York before the auction.
The masterpiece, which depicts Rome's Tiber River as seen from the Aventine Hill, remains on its original canvas and frame, with Turner's palette knife and brush marks still visible. Julian Gascoigne, a senior specialist at Sotheby's London, noted that the unlined surface preserves the delicate glazes of paint, contributing to the artwork's "extraordinary sense of light and depth and glow."
Commissioned in the late 1820s by Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, the painting was begun in Rome and completed in London, where it was first displayed at the Royal Academy in 1836 to mixed reviews. It remained in Munro's estate until 1878, when it was purchased by Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, as a wedding gift for his bride, Hannah de Rothschild. Turner, who first visited Rome in 1819 and again in the late 1820s, painted several works of the city, but 'Rome, From Mount Aventine' is noted as the only one depicting the city as it looked during his time there, rather than an evocation of a bygone age.