{"id":910187,"date":"2026-09-29T20:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T20:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910187\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T20:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T20:28:09","slug":"jmw-turners-great-love-letter-to-rome-makes-brief-return-to-city-before-uk-auction-jmw-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910187\/","title":{"rendered":"JMW Turner\u2019s \u2018great love letter\u2019 to Rome makes brief return to city before UK auction | JMW Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

A JMW Turner<\/a> painting of Rome that has been described as his \u201cgreat love letter\u201d to the city and has fleetingly returned there after almost 200 years is expected to set a new record when it goes up for sale in December.<\/p>\n

One of the few works by Turner that remains in private ownership, Rome, From Mount Aventine will be on display at Palazzo Rondinini in central Rome from Tuesday to Thursday.<\/p>\n

The painting will then be shown in Hong Kong and New York before being transported back to London where it is expected to fetch \u00a350m when auctioned by Sotheby\u2019s on 9 December.<\/p>\n

The masterpiece was last bought in 2014 when a private collector paid \u00a330.3m<\/a>, making it the most expensive painting by the artist ever sold to date.<\/p>\n

The golden-hued work, which depicts Rome\u2019s Tiber River as seen from the Aventine Hill, is still on its original canvas and in its original frame. Furthermore, it has never been relined or restored, with marks made by Turner\u2019s palette knife and brushes still visible, as well as his fingerprints from when he would have picked the canvas up to move it around his studio.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause it\u2019s unlined, the surface of the picture is extraordinarily well preserved,\u201d Julian Gascoigne, a senior specialist at Sotheby\u2019s London, told reporters in Rome. \u201cYou can see all the delicate glazes of translucent paint that he\u2019s built up over successive painting sessions that give the picture this extraordinary sense of light and depth and glow. You can see the teeth of the brush and the scrape of the palette knife in a way that is not really seen in almost any other work by the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julian Gascoigne (left) and Mario Tavella of Sotheby\u2019s at a press conference in Rome. Photograph: Yara Nardi\/Reuters<\/p>\n

The painting has exchanged hands only twice since it was commissioned by Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, an amateur British artist who accompanied Turner on his sketching tours, in the late 1820s.<\/p>\n

Turner began the work in Rome and completed it in London, where it was displayed for the first time at the Royal Academy to mixed reviews in 1836.<\/p>\n

The painting remained in Munro\u2019s estate until 1878, when it was bought by Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery and a prominent 19th-century British prime minister, as a wedding gift for his bride, Hannah de Rothschild.<\/p>\n

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Turner first visited Rome in 1819 and then again in the late 1820s, when he was part of a thriving community of artists, sculptors, writers and poets based in the area of the Spanish Steps.<\/p>\n

Turner, who died in 1851, produced several paintings of the city. \u201cHowever, this is the only painting by the artist of Rome as it looked during his time,\u201d Gascoigne said. \u201cEvery other painting he did of Rome was an evocation of a bygone age. But this is the only portrait of the city. In many ways, it\u2019s his great love letter to the city that inspired him throughout his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mario Tavella, the chair of Sotheby\u2019s Europe<\/a>, said he hoped the painting would be bought by a public museum \u201cwhere it could be admired by everyone\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A JMW Turner painting of Rome that has been described as his \u201cgreat love letter\u201d to the city…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-910187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}