A Rare Chance to See a Turner Masterpiece Up Very Close
The New Yorker · Anthony Lane ·
Anthony Lane writes about the history of the oil painting “Rome, from Mount Aventine,” by J. M. W. Turner, now on view at Sotheby’s, on Madison Avenue.
“Rome, from Mount Aventine” is an oil painting by Turner—or, to give him his full due, Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A. It measures just over three feet by four; owners of a fifty-five-inch TV will have a rough idea of the size, although the colors in the Turner would make the engineers at Samsung break down and cry. Should you wish to install the work in your home, the happy news is that it needs no internet connection; the only slight drawback is that it may cost you north of sixty-seven million dollars. That is the conservative estimate placed on the painting by Sotheby’s, in whose New York branch it will temporarily hang, before going under the gavel at the company’s London auction house, on December 9th. Somebody, somewhere, is going to have a poorer but happier Christmas.
Nowadays, it is not uncommon for single paintings awaiting sale to go on tour like rock stars. “Salvator Mundi”—a portrait of Jesus, which, depending on your taste and your scholarly instinct, was wholly or partly or minimally painted by Leonardo da Vinci—travelled to Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, and Singapore before being hawked at Christie’s in New York, in 2017. It sold for more than four hundred and fifty million dollars and then went quiet; reportedly, it now resides in Saudi Arabia, although, for all we know, it could be hanging out at the Chateau Marmont and running up a bar tab for the ages. Similarly, “Rome, from Mount Aventine” has been on the road. Before New York, it was in Hong Kong; before Hong Kong, in London; and, before London, in Rome, where it was displayed in lonely splendor at the Palazzo Rondinini, between the River Tiber and the Villa Borghese gardens. The painting was, so to speak, returning to its place of birth.
The date of that birth is not easy to pin down. The first stirrings of “Rome, from Mount Aventine” can be traced to a trip that Turner made to Italy in 1828, the third of seven visits to the country. At the age of fifty-three, he arrived in Rome in October, having set off from England in August. (Imprudently, he delayed his return until January, 1829. When his stagecoach foundered in the alpine snows, Turner calmly rendered the scene in a dramatic watercolor; what was a disaster for his fellow-travellers was, for him, an aesthetic opportunity.) During his months in the city, he made several intricate sketches that would contribute to “Rome, from Mount Aventine.” By good fortune, they still exist, in the possession of London’s Tate Gallery, and can be compared with the finished painting. But how long was it in the finishing?
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