Someone Sent a Fuzzy Photo of a Painting to Christie’s. It Turned Out to Be a Rare Watercolor by J.M.W. Turner

When art expert Rosie Jarvie glimpsed a photo of a painting submitted to Christie’s online appraisal service, she knew it may be something special.

“The [submitted] image was poor, and the painting was behind old glass, which had a greenish tint,” Jarvie, the auction house’s specialist in British drawings and watercolors, tells the Art Newspaper’s Melanie Gerlis. Still, she “had an instinct, from the strong brushstrokes, economy of line and the palette, that we really needed to see this properly.”

The painting turned out to be a watercolor by the English artist J.M.W. Turner. Born in 1775, Turner is “perhaps the best-loved English Romantic artist,” as London’s National Gallery writes. He painted landscapes and seascapes with a unique attention to light and color, and experts say his work laid the foundations for Impressionism later in the 19th century.

Christie’s will auction off the recently identified watercolor, titled The Approach to Venice or Venice From the Lagoon, at its Old Master and British Drawings sale in New York on February 4. Dated to around 1840, the painting is expected to fetch between $300,000 and $500,000.

The Approach to Venice’s current owner is a descendent of Haddon C. Adams, a 20th-century engineer and art connoisseur who fastidiously collected the work of John Ruskin, a 19th-century English writer and artist. He admired Ruskin throughout his life, saying once that “collecting Ruskin is my one luxury,” per Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred.

When Adams acquired The Approach to Venice around 1930, the painting was correctly attributed to Turner. Though the artist had bequeathed most of his work to the United Kingdom’s national art collection, some pieces were left to his dealer, Thomas Griffith, including The Approach to Venice. Sometime after Adams purchased it, the painting was misidentified as a Ruskin piece, according to the Art Newspaper.

The misidentification—and Adams’ purchase of the painting—may be related to the fact that Ruskin actually knew and admired Turner. In fact, Ruskin and his father were regular patrons of Turner’s: They commissioned paintings, and Ruskin got intimate access to Turner’s work. As art historian Robert Hewison told the Art Newspaper’s Ben Luke in 2019, “Turner would show him the sketches, and say: ‘What do you think of this, would you like me to work this up into a finished painting?’ And Ruskin would see the imaginative processes.”

Though Ruskin did make art, he devoted the majority of his career to writing about it—which included championing the work of Turner. Per Artnet, Ruskin once called Turner “the greatest painter of all time, a man whose supremacy of power no intellect of past ages can be put in comparison for a moment.”

When Christie’s received the watercolor, Turner expert Peter Bower concluded that its paper matched other Turner paintings of Venice. Another Turner scholar, Ian Warrell, confirmed the painting’s origins.

The work’s new attribution makes it significantly more valuable: Jarvie tells the Art Newspaper that a Turner painting is worth about ten times more money than a Ruskin. In 2023, a Turner watercolor sold for more than $1 million. Jarvie says the estimate on The Approach to Venice “should invite competition.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.