A Rare Chance to See a Turner Masterpiece Up Very Close
Racking up the air miles, requiring no sleep, and still in tremendous shape, a distinguished visitor—a real piece of work—is arriving in New York and staying on Madison Avenue. Callers will be received from Saturday, November 7th, through Wednesday the 18th. High rollers are especially welcome, but anyone can come.
“Rome, from Mount Aventine” is an oil painting by Turner—or, to give him his full due, Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A. It measures just over three feet by four; owners of a fifty-five-inch TV will have a rough idea of the size, although the colors in the Turner would make the engineers at Samsung break down and cry. Should you wish to install the work in your home, the happy news is that it needs no internet connection; the only slight drawback is that it may cost you north of sixty-seven million dollars. That is the conservative estimate placed on the painting by Sotheby’s, in whose New York branch it will temporarily hang, before going under the gavel at the company’s London auction house, on December 9th. Somebody, somewhere, is going to have a poorer but happier Christmas.
Nowadays, it is not uncommon for single paintings awaiting sale to go on tour like rock stars. “Salvator Mundi”—a portrait of Jesus, which, depending on your taste and your scholarly instinct, was wholly or partly or minimally painted by Leonardo da Vinci—travelled to Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, and Singapore before being hawked at Christie’s in New York, in 2017. It sold for more than four hundred and fifty million dollars and then went quiet; reportedly, it now resides in Saudi Arabia, although, for all we know, it could be hanging out at the Chateau Marmont and running up a bar tab for the ages. Similarly, “Rome, from Mount Aventine” has been on the road. Before New York, it was in Hong Kong; before Hong Kong, in London; and, before London, in Rome, where it was displayed in lonely splendor at the Palazzo Rondinini, between the River Tiber and the Villa Borghese gardens. The painting was, so to speak, returning to its place of birth.
The date of that birth is not easy to pin down. The first stirrings of “Rome, from Mount Aventine” can be traced to a trip that Turner made to Italy in 1828, the third of seven visits to the country. At the age of fifty-three, he arrived in Rome in October, having set off from England in August. (Imprudently, he delayed his return until January, 1829. When his stagecoach foundered in the alpine snows, Turner calmly rendered the scene in a dramatic watercolor; what was a disaster for his fellow-travellers was, for him, an aesthetic opportunity.) During his months in the city, he made several intricate sketches that would contribute to “Rome, from Mount Aventine.” By good fortune, they still exist, in the possession of London’s Tate Gallery, and can be compared with the finished painting. But how long was it in the finishing?
If you want to see a field of battle being keenly contested, try the dating of paintings by art historians. Quarrels over dates are not as lethally implacable as quarrels over attribution—who painted what?—but, then, nothing is. The fact that the wood of the frame over which “Rome, from Mount Aventine” is stretched, for instance, appears to be of Italian manufacture could mean that Turner began mapping out the work in Rome. If so, he must have had it in mind, and perhaps in hand, by the time he left the place, and then gone back to the canvas in the years to come, though the pattern of his labors is unclear. Turner was hardly alone among artists in devoting the same intensity of care to the enrichment of a painting that others give to the rearing of a child.
What we do know is that the painting was finally exhibited at the Royal Academy, in London, in 1836, and that it was bought by Hugh Munro, one of Turner’s most important patrons, who had originally commissioned it. Munro was a fascinating specimen: a wealthy Scot, though not a nobleman, he didn’t lord it over Turner so much as befriend him, despite being more than twenty years his junior, and the two of them even journeyed through France and Italy together, drawing and painting as they went, with the artist acting as his patron’s informal tutor. A shy soul, Munro had inherited his fortune via an uncle only after the untimely death of the latter’s sons. One was killed by a tiger and the other by a shark.
So, what did Munro get for his money, when he bought “Rome, from Mount Aventine”? An amalgam of the precise and the visionary, such as Turner alone could concoct. We find ourselves on the southernmost of the city’s seven hills, the Aventine, gazing at once downward, across, and afar. Immediately below us, a bald-headed friar passes; a young woman greets him on her knees, raising her hands in supplication. Miles away, in the distance, on the left, another dome—that of St. Peter’s—breaks the horizon and rhymes with the friar’s pate. In between is the slow, broad blue-violet curve of the Tiber, whose waters seem to rise like vapors and cling to the buildings on the shore: a capillary action, and an ideal match for the way in which the Roman past, refusing to evaporate, insists on climbing and sticking to the stones, and the human lives, of the present day.
The painting is commanded by an umbrella pine, which arches high into the butter-yellow heavens, on the right, leaning over the heart of the composition. Framing by tree is a well-worn trick, perfected by Claude Lorrain, whom Turner revered, and deployed by Turner long before he ever went to Rome (as in his depiction of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl, from 1814-15, now housed in the Yale Center for British Art). The slanting trunk of the pine, in “Rome, from Mount Aventine,” is answered, at a near-right angle, on the left, by a not quite horizontal block of white, set back from the river. This is the Ospizio di San Michele a Ripa, in Trastevere. Approach the painting, close enough to see the scratchy hatchings with which Turner enlivens the walls and roofs of the riverside dwellings, and you will notice three tiny awnings, left open, on the Ospizio’s long façade: grace notes to interrupt any threat of monotone. Our eyes deserve to be occupied.
All this was too much for some early viewers. The painting was disdained, by a critic in Blackwood’s magazine, as “a most unpleasant mixture, wherein white gambouge and raw sienna are, with childish execution, daubed together.” Gambouge, or gamboge, is a toxic yellow-gold pigment derived from resin. In other words, the quality that now pulls us most startlingly into “Rome, from Mount Aventine”—its all-pervading luminescence—is exactly what unnerved the reviewer, who claimed that Turner “has robbed the sun of its birthright to cast shadows.” As so often, hostility is more suggestive than acclaim; despite the darkness in the southeast quarter of the painting, it is overbearingly bright, as if the Eternal City were itself a source of light. In a postscript to the controversy, the young John Ruskin was so incensed by the article in Blackwood’s that he leaped to the defense of Turner, who forwarded his broadside to Munro. It was the opening salvo in what would become Ruskin’s lifelong campaign to appraise, and to praise, Turner’s art. If you buy this painting, therefore, you are getting not just a glorious staging post in Turner’s career, plus a chapter in the long saga of Italy worship, but, also, for what it’s worth, a footnote in the history of criticism.
In mid-October, in London, I spent an hour with “Rome, from Mount Aventine.” To see it in the flesh is to realize how much blood is lost in even the most exacting of reproductions. The scumbled clouds at the top left, barely perceptible on the page of a book, could be read as more Venetian than Roman—rose-pink against blue, as in the dawn sky of a Giovanni Bellini. The texture there is notably thick; according to Julian Gascoigne, a specialist in British art at Sotheby’s, “a lot of that is knife work,” meaning that the paint was applied with a palette knife. It looks as fresh as cream. Gascoigne and I stood in front of the picture, the condition of which, barring a few cracks, is almost laughably untouched by time. No ill-advised Victorian restorations, no heavy varnishings, no smuts from candle smoke. Also, it’s unlined; that is to say, no extra backing was glued to the rear of the canvas to lend it support. (Such a process, as Gascoigne told me, “can seriously diminish the surface.”) The glow of many Turners has dwindled, thanks to unstable pigments, but here is an immaculate exception. Were its creator to see it now, he would presumably feel gratified. Indeed, as an inveterate meddler, he would probably pick up his brushes and carry on the good work.
The bidding for “Rome, from Mount Aventine,” in December, is unlikely to be as serene as the atmosphere that reigns within the frame. Having tempted prospective buyers during its global stops, the picture will have cranked up the force of their coveting. It is quite possible that, once sold, like “Salvator Mundi,” it will vanish from sight; I like to think that, in a nod to the family of its first owner, it might wind up on the walls of a Bond villain’s hideout, to complement his handsome gathering of tigers and sharks. (Keep in mind that a treasure that goes into a private collection can always come back out.) On the whole, though, it would be more fitting if, like a pilgrim, the painting found its way to Rome. “This is Turner’s love letter to the Rome that inspired the Grand Tour,” Gascoigne said to me. “More than just giving you a visual representation of the topography of the city, he’s trying to evoke the sensation of actually being there.”
As for the competition, it would be surprising if the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, were not to enter the fray. “Rome, from Mount Aventine” would make a natural companion for “Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino,” another of Turner’s dreamlike cityscapes, from the same era, which the museum already owns. Reuniting the pair would be like getting Romulus back together with Remus. Both pictures were bought from Munro’s estate, in 1878, by Lord Rosebery, who could afford them, having recently taken the wise precaution of marrying a Rothschild; the couple went so far as to pause their honeymoon, in Scotland, to view the paintings. (As the new bride explained, in a letter, “Archie wanted to see the Turners.”) Rosebery was later to become the British Prime Minister, though for little more than a year. Painting being a more enduring art than politics, both “Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino” and “Rome, from Mount Aventine” stayed in his family for generations, until this century. The first went to the Getty, in 2010, and the second, in 2014, to buyers unnamed, for around forty million dollars.
But why fight for this Turner, the galleries and the billionaires will ask, rather than any other? Because, as Gascoigne said, “It is now one of the last great handful of masterpieces, particularly from the late period of his work, that remain in private hands.” Soon it will pass to other hands; for the moment, though not for long, it is out in the open. Go and see it on Madison Avenue, and, for good measure, observe how other people see it, too. In “Modern Painters,” Ruskin wrote, “I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd—‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it hurt your eyes?’—expressed as if they were in the constant habit of looking the sun full in the face.” We all need dazzling these days. Catch the light while you can. ♦