J. M. W. Turner valuation

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was born in Covent Garden in London, the son of a barber, entered the Royal Academy Schools at fourteen and was elected a full Academician in 1802, at twenty-six. He began as a topographical watercolourist, touring Britain to draw its towns, castles and abbeys, and became the most ambitious landscape painter of his age, travelling repeatedly to Italy, Switzerland and France and painting storms, shipwrecks, sunsets and, in Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844, the railway. The Fighting Temeraire of 1839 is in the National Gallery. He left the contents of his studio to the nation, and the Turner Bequest, some three hundred oil paintings and around thirty thousand works on paper, is at Tate Britain. The Turner Prize, founded in 1984, is named after him.

Because so much of his work went to the nation, oil paintings by Turner are rare on the market, and watercolours and drawings make up most of what changes hands, from early topographical views to the late, luminous studies. Condition is critical, since the blues of some of his watercolours have faded in daylight. He was widely imitated and copied in the nineteenth century, and attribution rests on comparison with the Bequest and on documented history. Prints are the accessible end: the mezzotints of his Liber Studiorum, where early impressions are worth much more than later ones, and the many line engravings made after his watercolours for illustrated books and series such as Picturesque Views in England and Wales, which are plentiful and modestly valued.