JMV Turner's famed British seascape up for auction, says report

A seascape by renowned Brit­ish painter JMV Turner will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on Wed­nesday. The painting that can be viewed at Soth­eby’s London auction house is ex­p­ected to sell for between £4 million and £6 million ($5.5 million to $8.3 million.) Aside from a brief au­c­­tion in New York in 1945, the painting hasn’t been displayed publicly in over a century.

Sotheby’s declined to say who owns “Purfleet and the Essex Shore as seen from Long Reach”, which depicts a slew of fisherman and their boats thrashing in the waves of the Thames Estuary. It’s part of a series of work “that established Turner’s contemporary fame and reputation as the greatest seascape painter that ever lived,” said Julian Gasco­igne, director of early British paintings at Sotheby’s.

“He really is the fulcrum on which Western art hinges,” Gascoigne said. He added that Turner was both inspired by and competed with older masters, while he also looked to­w­ards modernism and abs­t­raction. The pieces in the series, painted between 1806 and 1809 at the height of the Napoleonic wars, are all of scenes at the mouth of the Thames. The painting up for bid shows a warship also lurking in the background, positioned to defend London.

It was the subject of the sea itself and Turner’s depiction of it, however, that distinguished him. “(Its) swirling vortex of moving waves ... that’s what really was revolutionary to his contemporaries,” Gascoigne said.

Last year, Turner’s self-portrait replaced economist Adam Smith’s on Britain’s 20-pound note.