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 Tyeb Mehta FIAC Lures Iconic (and Expensive) Works to Paris

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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.