Turner’s Rome painting returns for brief display before December auction

J.M.W. Turner’s Rome, from Mount Aventine is on temporary display in Rome before a planned December auction in London. The painting, among the few major Turner works still privately owned, is being shown at Palazzo Rondinini from Tuesday through Thursday, giving visitors in the city a brief chance to see a view of Rome that has spent nearly two centuries elsewhere.

The painting is then due to travel to Hong Kong and New York before returning to London for a Sotheby’s sale scheduled for December 9, according to the Guardian. The newspaper reports that it is expected to fetch £50 million. That figure is a forecast, not a sale result; the final price and the painting’s next owner will depend on the auction.

A view of Turner’s own Rome

The golden-toned painting depicts the Tiber and Rome as seen from the Aventine Hill. Sotheby’s specialist Julian Gascoigne called it Turner’s “great love letter” to the city, an interpretation he linked to the artist’s lasting interest in Rome. Gascoigne told reporters that, unlike Turner’s other paintings of Rome, this one shows the city as it looked during the artist’s lifetime rather than imagining an earlier age.

Turner visited Rome in 1819 and returned in the late 1820s. Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, an amateur artist and a companion on some of Turner’s sketching tours, commissioned the work in that later period. The Guardian reports that Turner began it in Rome and completed it in London. It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836, where responses were mixed.

Why its condition draws attention

The picture remains on its original, unlined canvas and in its original frame, according to the Guardian’s account of the Rome presentation. Gascoigne said this has left its surface unusually clear: viewers can see translucent layers of paint, brush strokes, palette-knife marks and fingerprints attributed to Turner. He said those layers help give the scene its light and depth.

A conservation report reproduced in Sotheby’s 2014 catalogue provides a more detailed account. Conservator Simon Howell described an exceptionally well-preserved paint surface and visible fingerprints near the top edge. He also recorded small areas of damage and retouching. The report therefore offers a precise account of the painting’s condition without treating its long survival as proof that every part of the surface is untouched.

A short ownership history

Sotheby’s catalogue traces the painting from Munro’s commission through his family to its sale in 1878. Archibald Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, acquired it for himself and his wife, Hannah Rothschild. The catalogue also records a long-term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland from 1978 to 2013, a period when a work held privately was accessible through a public institution.

The work last came to auction in 2014. The Guardian reports that a private buyer paid £30.3 million, then the highest price for a Turner painting at auction. Sotheby’s earlier catalogue confirms the painting’s identity and provenance, while the Guardian’s account supplies the reported result. The anticipated £50 million for December would exceed that figure if achieved, but the sale has yet to take place.

What happens after Rome

The Rome display is scheduled to end Thursday. The Guardian reports that Hong Kong and New York are the next planned stops before the December 9 London auction; it does not give dates for those showings. The route makes the Rome appearance a temporary exhibition rather than a return to a permanent home in the city.

Mario Tavella, chair of Sotheby’s Europe, told the Guardian that he hoped a public museum would buy the painting so it could be seen by everyone. That is a hope, not an announced acquisition. Whether a museum or private collector buys it, and where it will be displayed after the sale, remains open.