A painting submitted by a member of the public through Christie’s “request an estimate” online appraisals service has turned out to be a prized watercolour by J.M.W. Turner. It will come to auction for between $300,000 and $500,000 at Christie’s Old Master and British drawings sale in New York on 4 February.
The work, now known to be The Approach to Venice or Venice from the Lagoon (around 1840), depicts an incoming storm and had been in the family of the English engineer and collector Haddon C. Adams since around 1930. It was, around that time, still catalogued as a Turner but subsequently believed to have been painted by the English polymath, John Ruskin.
“The [submitted] image was poor, and the painting was behind old glass, which had a greenish tint,” says Rosie Jarvie, Christie’s specialist in British drawings and watercolours. She says though that she “had an instinct, from the strong brushstrokes, economy of line and the palette, that we really needed to see this properly”.
Most of Turner’s watercolours remained in his possession until he died in 1851 and then went into the UK’s national collection, as part of the Turner Bequest. Some, however, remained with his dealer, Thomas Griffith (1795-1868), including the Christie’s work. Follow-up analysis and an examination by the specialist historian, Peter Bower, confirmed that this was made on the same type of paper as many of the artist’s views of Venice in the Turner Bequest.
The reattribution to a work from the artist’s third and final visit to Venice in 1840 was rubber-stamped by the expert Ian Warrell, who has written the catalogue essay for Christie’s sale. Turner’s watercolours have sold for much more than the Christie’s estimate—in 2023, a similarly loose sketch, Sunrise over the Sea, perhaps at Margate (1845), was estimated between £600,000 and £800,000, and sold for £1m (with fees).
As a Turner, the work is worth around ten times more than a Ruskin, Jarvie says, adding that the estimate on next month’s Venice work “should invite competition”.
A double-sided portrait by the folk portraitist Ammi Phillips (around 1815) Courtesy of Christie’s
Coincidentally, Christie's will offer in the coming weeks another work that was consigned via its online appraisals service. A double-sided portrait by the folk portraitist Ammi Phillips from around 1815, found in a storage unit in California before being submitted to Christie’s via its public website, is a highlight of its Important Americana auction on 24 January (est $40,000-$80,000). While Christie’s doesn’t have the total number of auction-worthy works that have come through its online portal, which it launched in 2005, Jarvie says, in her field at least, “things like this just don’t happen through the website”.