Rare Turner Roman Landscape Painting Heads to Sotheby’s With $66.2 M. Price Tag

A rare J.M.W. Turner painting is coming to Sotheby’s with an estimate of £50 million ($66.2 million). Rome, from Mount Aventine (1836) will be auctioned in London on December 9 during the house’s Old Master Evening Sale, but before it does, it will be exhibited at Palazzo Rondinini, an 18th-century Baroque palace in Rome, through to October 1.

The painting is one of the few Turners that’s still in private hands. According to Sotheby’s, the painting is believed to have been conceived and mapped out in Italy, but later completed in London. Turner was commissioned to paint the picture, showing Rome bathed in a golden light, by British art collector Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar, who was also a close friend of the artist.

Some four decades later, the painting was acquired in 1876 by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery and future British prime minister, for £6,142 (about £636,165 today) as a wedding gift to celebrate his marriage to Hannah de Rothschild, who was the wealthiest woman in the country at the time.

Rome, from Mount Aventine (1836) has only made its way to auction once before; in 2014, the Rosebery family, which had held onto it for more than 130 years, put the painting up for auction, where it sold for £30.3 million (£43.47 today). In the painting’s 191-year history, it has not been relined or restored and remains on its original canvas and frame.

“Few paintings capture Turner’s genius as vividly and completely as this extraordinary vision of Rome’s timeless beauty,” Julian Gascoigne, senior specialist of British paintings at Sotheby’s London, said in a statement. “Created at the height of his powers, it is a work of extraordinary ambition, beauty and innovation, one that has come to define not only Turner’s achievement but the very course of modern painting.”