Isn’t it time Turner fetched the same prices as Monet?
Apainting by JMW Turner, which has been in private collections in the US and Japan for more a century, returns to London for sale this summer, when it is expected to sell for between £4million and £6million. It was executed sometime between 1845 and 1850 (he died in 1851), and Sotheby’s says it is one of a group of about ten fascinating paintings from the last decade of his life.
The subject is a view of the bridges at Walton-on-thames in Surrey, near where Turner lived in the early 19th century. He had drawn a very similar view in 1806, which was turned into a mezzotint engraving for his book on landscape painting, Liber Studiorum (1807-1819).
In the 1840s, Turner, his reputation long since established, revisited these studies, reprinting the book, and at the same time painting some of the subjects in the late, looser style he was experimenting with. In Landscape
with Walton Bridges he returns to an old subject, but suffuses it with atmospheric light effects, idealising the view to such an extent that for many years subsequently it was thought to be an Italian landscape.
In the Turner wing at Tate Britain, there is a gallery devoted to unfinished work found in his studio after his
death, some of which relates, like Landscape with Walton Bridges, to the
late Liber Studiorum series. Norham Castle, Sunrise from the 1840s, has often been cited as a forerunner of impressionism. “It is the ultimate late Turner,” Tate curator David Blayney Brown has said, with the subject “dissolving rather than being defined” in a misty light.
In an essay written for the late Turner exhibition Painting Set Free at Tate Britain in 2014, Brown describes how in the 1840s Turner produced ten or so “loosely handled, light-filled oils based on the Liber prints”. Although
Landscape with Walton Bridges is not mentioned, it is surely one of them. Whether these “Liber transcriptions” are finished pictures by Turner’s definition or “works in progress” is “ultimately unanswerable”, he writes.
When he died, Turner left some 300 paintings and thousands of works on paper to the nation. A small number, including Landscape with Walton
Bridges, were left to his landlady and lover of 18 years, Sophia Booth. In 1865, her son Daniel Pound sold 11 of these, including Landscape with
Walton Bridges, for £4,000. It changed hands several times until 1888, when it was bought by JS Morgan, the father of the US banker JP Morgan, with whose family it stayed until October 1982.
At that time, Turner was at the top of the art market – his Juliet and her
Nurse sold in 1980 for $6.4million (£5 million) to South American collector Amalia de Fortabat – a record for any painting at auction. The only other Turner to have come near that was an 1820s classical view of the Temple of Jupiter, which sold in July 1982 for $1 million to the New York dealer Richard Feigen.
JP Morgan’s son Henry probably reckoned his late Turner could make the same price and it was offered at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet three months later with a $1million estimate; but it didn’t sell. However, the Japanese were beginning to show interest in western art and impressionism, and London dealers Agnew were able to place it privately with the Japanese collector who is now selling.
The record for Turner has since climbed to £30million, not a number Sotheby’s are setting their sights at this time. But when Landscape with Walton
Bridges goes on view in Hong Kong, buyers might be asking why Turner, especially late and possibly unfinished Turners, shouldn’t be closer to Monet, whose record stands at $85million.