J. M. W. Turner

From the Files

+ In 1986 Paul Mellon lost the bidding war at Sotheby's London for the ca. 1846 "Channel" sketchbook, Turner's last. It sold to a London dealer for just over $700,000. Fearing that the dealer might break it up, Mellon bought the book from him for an undisclosed sum. The work is now in the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut.

+ A few months before its sister watercolor The Blue Rigi, 1842, fetched $11 million at Christie's in 2006, the London dealer Simon Dickinson sold The Dark Rigi to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C., for about $5 million. Following the Christie's sale, however, Dickinson withdrew his application for the work's export license. Its fate remains unknown.

+ Shortly before his death in 1970, Mark Rothko donated a series of murals to the Tate Gallery in London, because he admired the collection—its Turner trove in particular.

Lucian Freud Joseph Mallord William Turner Eugene Delacroix Francis Bacon Claude Lorrain Paul Signac Yippee, We're All Going to Die He Who Laughs Last

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The artist’s works are as impressive as the record-setting bids they achieve. But a dearth of privately held oils has made his watercolors—highly regarded by Turner himself—hot commodities.

Britain’s second most expensive artist at auction—sandwiched be­­tween contemporary-art darlings Francis Bacon, whose vast Triptych, 1976, made $86.3 million at Sotheby’s New York in May 2008, and Lucian Freud, whose monumental painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, fetched $33.6 million at Christie’s New York that same month—is Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), the peerless land- and seascape artist often cited as a precursor of the Impressionists. Turner’s record was set in April 2006 at Christie’s New York by his circa 1841 oil Giudecca, la Donna della Salute and San Giorgio. The late Venetian view, carrying an unpublished estimate in excess of $20 million, sold to Steve Wynn, the well-known Las Vegas hotelier, for $35.9 million. But even that sum is a modest measure of the artist’s worth: Experts who worked on the insurance valuation of the Turner exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, through September 21, reveal that several of his paintings on view carry estimates of more than $100 million each.

Those are no small prices for a man who fellow artist Eugène Delacroix said looked more like a farmer than a painter. Born in 1775 in Covent Garden, a street market area in London, Turner was the son of a barber and wigmaker, who displayed in his shopwindow his son’s earliest drawings and watercolors, mostly copies of prints by other artists. By the age of 19, Turner had received his first commission, for a series of engravings. In 1802 he became the youngest artist to be elected to the Royal Academy, the most prestigious exhibiting society in Britain, and two years later he opened a gallery in central London to show his work to potential clients.

Ever the astute businessman, Turner realized early on that printmaking and book illustration would not only provide him with a living but also spread his fame. He published his first engravings—Welsh landscapes—in 1794, and over the next 44 years traveled throughout the British Isles making topographical and picturesque drawings and watercolors for series with such titles as “Views of Sussex” and “Ports of England.” He also found inspiration in poetry, illustrating the work of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and Samuel Rogers.

“Turner was obsessive about every aspect of printmaking,” says Lindsay Stainton, the art historian and former curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum. Some engravings he worked on for an entire year. Proofs can be bought for less than $1,000. Original copies of his book of engravings for Samuel Rogers’s poem “Italy” can be found on eBay for $70.

Of course, the original drawings and watercolors now cost much more, and those Turner did for private patrons or simply for his own pleasure much more again. The artist always considered watercolor to be as important a genre as oil painting and painted prolifically in the former medium. Despite his estate’s bequest to the Tate Britain of nearly 30,000 watercolors and sketches—including 300 sketchbooks—along with 300 oils, perhaps 500 major watercolors still exist in private hands, according to Emmeline Hallmark, the head of British paintings at Sotheby’s London. Each year, between 10 and 20 often quite minor examples, on average, appear at auction, with several more acquired by dealers from collectors. Prices can vary dramatically—from less than $20,000, says Harriet Drummond, Christie’s head of British art on paper, to $10 million, depending on how original, well preserved or finished the piece is.

In 2001, a benchmark was created with the £2 million ($2.8 million) sale to the Texan collector William Morris of Heidelberg with a Rainbow, 1840–45 (£600–800,000; $850,000–1.4 million), at Sotheby’s London. This exceptional price for a watercolor was not bettered until June 2006, when an anonymous overseas buyer paid £5.8 million ($11 million) at Christie’s London for Turner’s 1842 Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise (est. in excess of £2 million; $4 million), one of three renderings of the same scene which most Turner experts agree represent the peak of his achievement in atmospheric watercolor composition.