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 The Appendix: Francis Bacon and Sadomasochism, Cheap Conceptualism, and Arts Education Tyeb Mehta

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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.