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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 The late Venetian view, carrying an unpublished estimate in excess of $20 million, sold to Steve Wynn, the well-known Las Vegas hotelier, for $35.9 million.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.

The success of The Blue Rigi triggered the largest sale of Turner watercolors in more than 70 years: In July 2007 Sotheby’s London offered 14 watercolors from the collection of the Belgian businessman Baron Guy Ullens and his wife, Myriam, with a guarantee and a combined estimate of £10 million to £15 million ($20.3–30.5 million). Ullens put the works on the block to raise funds for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, in Beijing. His collection was the best that money could buy, assembled over 10 to 15 years with the help of the London dealer Matthew Green, of Richard Green Ltd.

Prices paid for some of Ullens’s works were substantially greater than any that Turners had earned in previous auctions. A highly finished landscape from the artist’s first trip to Switzerland, The Lake of Thun, 1804–06, which a Swiss dealer had bought for £118,000 ($236,200) at a 2005 Kornfeld gallery auction in Switzerland before selling it to Ullens, went to an anonymous collector for £916,000 ($1.9 million) against an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000 ($814,000–1.2 million). The sale’s top price, and the second highest at that time for a Turner watercolor—£3.6 million ($7.3 million)—was paid by an anonymous buyer for Swiss Lake, Lungernzee, circa 1848 (est. £2–3 million; $4.1–6.1 million), which was based on drawings from the artist’s last visit to Switzerland, in 1844, before ill health put an end to his travels. Other works in the auction, however, suffered because of resistance to the estimates, and the sale brought a combined total of just £10.8 million ($22 million).

Several dealers regularly have Turner watercolors in stock. Richard Green has a landscape The Ruins of Raglan Castle, in Yorkshire, that is priced at £100,000 ($200,000). Lowell Libson, a London-based watercolor specialist, has some coastal drawings from the 1790s for $25,000 each, as well as a view of Aldborough, in Suffolk, that Turner made for his “Great Rivers” series of engravings but never published, which Libson is offering at just under $1 million. The New York dealer Richard Feigen has several “minor” seascapes and beach scenes for between $35,000 and $75,000.

Perhaps the rarest Turner watercolors are the studies that somehow slipped out of the sketchbooks now at the Tate, possibly removed—before their bequest to the British nation—by the art critic John Ruskin, who championed Turner, or by the artist’s family, as gifts for friends. The London dealer Andrew Wyld, one of the foremost experts in English watercolors, has identified several of these in his 35-year career, beginning with a previously unrecognized study for the circa 1827 Petworth House, portraying the country home of Turner’s patron Lord Egremont (the house and its celebrated art collection, including 20 Turner oils, are now open to the public). The picture, which Wyld discovered in a small salesroom in 1977 and later sold privately, appeared on the cover of the catalogue for the 1983 Turner exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. His most recent acquisition is an undated sketch of clouds and churning sea from a series that is part of the Tate’s holdings, for which he paid £217,250 ($425,000) against an estimate of £150,000 to £250,000 ($300–500,000) at Christie’s this past June but has yet to price for sale.

While relatively many Turner watercolors are available for purchase, few oils are; at press time none of the dealers contacted for this story had any for sale. Hallmark, of Sotheby’s, estimates that only 20 major oils by Turner are in private hands and could possibly come onto the market.

One of the biggest Turner collectors of the mid- to late 20th century was the Anglophile American millionaire Paul Mellon, who paid groundbreaking prices for his acquisitions, including two paintings that are in the Met exhibition: the early Dutch seascape Dort, 1818, Turner’s homage to 17th-century Dutch painting, which Mellon bought in 1966 from Agnew’s, in London, for £600,000 ($1.7 million); and Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, 1832, one of the artist’s most powerful seascapes, for which the collector paid £820,000 ($1.4 million) in 1977.

Turner’s early oils, which he began exhibiting when he was 20, were inspired by the French artist Claude Lorrains fashionable Arcadian landscapes. Typical of this period is Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, 1808, which went on the block at Sotheby’s London in July and sold to a private collector for £5.4 million ($10.7 million), below the high estimate of £7 million ($14 million) but a good price, nonetheless, for an early painting.

The first oil to propel Turner into the top tier of Old Masters and 19th-century artists was Juliet and her Nurse, circa 1836, which sold in 1980 at Sotheby’s London for £2.84 million ($6.7 million) to the South American collector Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, who has loaned it to the Met’s exhibition. Turner’s auction record was held until 2006 by Seascape, Folkestone, 1840–46, which the estate of the British art historian Lord Kenneth Clark sold in 1984 for £6.7 million ($8.7 million) to the Canadian collector David Thomson and which the New York collector Leon Black bought in the ’90s for an undisclosed sum.

Turner’s later works bring the highest prices, although they rarely exceed estimates at auction. In July 2004 at Sotheby’s London, the seascape Fort Vimieux, 1831, fetched £2.5 million ($4.5 million) against an estimate of £2 million to £3 million ($3.6–5.4 million) from the New York collector Gregory Callimanopulos, who has also lent the work to the Met. A slightly later but much smaller example of this genre, Wreckers on the Coast, circa 1840 (est. £700–900,000; $1.3–1.7 million), went for £767,200 ($1.4 million) four months later at Sotheby’s to the British dealer Daniel Katz.

In April 2007, Christie’s New York sold the circa 1841 mythological scene Glaucus and Scylla, of two figures swept up in the enormity of nature, presented as restituted property. The Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, Texas, which had held the painting from 1966 until 2006, when the institution returned it to the heirs of the owners from whom the Nazis seized it in 1943, bought it back for $6.4 million (est. $5–7 million). “It was a bargain,” says Feigen, who bid on behalf of the museum. “It could have fetched $20 million.”

Others might not attach a price to the work. Of Turner’s later oeuvre the acclaimed French painter Paul Signac (1863–1935) once said, “These are no longer pictures but aggregations of color—painting in the most beautiful sense of the word.”

"J. M. W. Turner" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.