Turner’s Rome landscape shown ahead of Sotheby’s sale

Painted in 1836, the landscape looks across Rome from the Aventine Hill: a stone pine in the foreground, the Tiber winding through the scene, and the city receding into a soft light. Shown in a Baroque palace built in the 18th century by a collector, the work returns to the city that helped shape Turner’s imagination.

For painters and draughtsmen, the picture is compelling for the way Turner builds space and atmosphere with very little that is merely descriptive. The composition holds distance, scale and light in balance, leaving the eye to move through the city rather than simply read it.

Sotheby’s is also pointing to the canvas’s exceptional condition: it has never been restored, remains on its original canvas and frame, and still shows Turner’s fingerprints, palette-knife scrapes and even individual brush hairs in the wet paint. Those marks make the artist’s working process unusually legible.

The work has a notable collecting history too: made for Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, later given as a wedding gift to Hannah de Rothschild, and sold only once since its 2014 auction at Sotheby’s London. Its return to the market matters not only for its value, but for what it reveals about Turner’s late practice and the rarity of such major works in private hands.