JMW Turner’s ‘great love letter’ to Rome makes brief return to city before UK auction

Rome, From Mount Aventine will also visit Hong Kong and New York before it is expected to sell for record price

A JMW Turner painting of Rome that has been described as his “great love letter” 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.

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.

The painting will then be shown in Hong Kong and New York before being transported back to London where it is expected to fetch £50m when auctioned by Sotheby’s on 9 December.

The masterpiece was last bought in 2014 when a private collector paid £30.3m, making it the most expensive painting by the artist ever sold to date.

The golden-hued work, which depicts Rome’s 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’s 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.

“Because it’s unlined, the surface of the picture is extraordinarily well preserved,” Julian Gascoigne, a senior specialist at Sotheby’s London, told reporters in Rome. “You can see all the delicate glazes of translucent paint that he’s 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.”

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.

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.

The painting remained in Munro’s 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.

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.

Turner, who died in 1851, produced several paintings of the city. “However, this is the only painting by the artist of Rome as it looked during his time,” Gascoigne said. “Every 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’s his great love letter to the city that inspired him throughout his life.”

Mario Tavella, the chair of Sotheby’s Europe, said he hoped the painting would be bought by a public museum “where it could be admired by everyone”.