Turner returns to Rome: “Rome, from Mount Aventine” on show at Palazzo Rondinini, up for auction at £50 million

One of J.M.W. Turner’s most important works has returned to Rome. “Rome, from Mount Aventine” (1836), the famous panorama of the city in morning light from the Aventine Hill, went on public display on Tuesday at Palazzo Rondinini — the 18th-century Baroque palace — in what Sotheby’s describes as a “homecoming”, as ARTnews reports. The painting will remain on show for three days, from September 29 to October 1, before beginning a world tour to Hong Kong and New York, and then going under the hammer in London.

On December 9 the work goes to Sotheby’s London Old Masters evening auction with an estimate of £50 million (around €58 million or $66 million). If achieved, it would break Turner’s auction record — a record held by… the same painting: in 2014 it sold for £30.3 million (around $47.5 million), doubling its low estimate at the time. “It is an extraordinary painting,” Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby’s senior specialist in British painting, told AFP.

The work’s history is as rich as the painting itself. It was commissioned in 1828 by Turner’s friend and patron Hugh Munro of Novar; Turner began it during his second visit to Rome, working from Charles Lock Eastlake’s studio near the Spanish Steps. In 1878 Archibald Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery (the future British prime minister), reportedly cut short his honeymoon with Hannah de Rothschild to buy it for £6,142 — around $1 million today. The painting stayed with the Rosebery family until the 2014 sale.

What makes the work rare is its condition: it is one of only two late Turner works that have never been relined and remain almost unchanged since the artist’s studio — still on its original stretcher, with Turner’s fingerprints and even his brush hairs, according to Sotheby’s. Turner applied watercolourist techniques in oil there, creating successive layers of transparent paint for the misty effect — an approach that, according to the auction house, inspired Monet and the French Impressionists, and later Mark Rothko. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836, together with “Juliet and her Nurse” — an event that prompted John Ruskin’s famous defense of Turner, the foundation of his “Modern Painters”.

Now the auction house hopes the masterpiece will find a public home: “I hope it ends up in a public museum, where everyone can admire it,” said Mario Tavella, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. According to Gascoigne, “at least half a dozen major” Turner masterpieces remain in private hands, and he is convinced the December sale “will set a new standard”.