Someone sent a faint photo of a painting to Christie’s. It turned out to be a rare watercolor by JMW Turner

When art expert Rosie Jarvie saw a photo of a painting submitted to Christie’s online valuation serviceshe knew it might be something special.

“The [submitted] the image was poor and the painting was behind old glass, which had a greenish tint,” Jarvie, the auction house’s specialist in British drawings and watercolors, told the Art newspaperby Melanie Gerlis. Yet “she had an instinct, through the strong brushstrokes, the economy of line and palette, that we really had to see this clearly.”

The painting turned out to be a watercolor by the English artist J. M. W. Turner. Turner, born in 1775, is “perhaps the best-loved Englishman Romantic artist”, such as that of London National Gallery writes. He painted landscapes and seascapes with a unique attention to light and color, and experts say his work laid the foundations for Impressionism later in the 19th century.

Christie’s is auctioning the recently identified watercolor, titled The approach to Venice or Venice from the lagoonbe with Old Masters and British drawings sale in New York on February 4. The painting dates from around 1840 expected to raise between $300,000 and $500,000.

The approach to VeniceThe current owner is a descendant of Haddon C. Adamsa 20th century engineer and art connoisseur who painstakingly collected the work of John Ruskina 19th century English writer and artist. He admired Ruskin all his life and once said that ‘collecting Ruskin is my only luxury’, per Artnet‘s Jo Lawson-Tancred.

When Adams acquired it The approach to Venice around 1930 the painting was correctly attributed to Turner. Although the artist left most of his work to the United Kingdom’s national art collection, some pieces were left to his dealer. Thomas Griffithincluded The approach to Venice. Sometime after Adams purchased it, the painting was misidentified as a Ruskin piece, according to the newspaper Art newspaper.

The misidentification – and Adams’ purchase of the painting – may be related to the fact that Ruskin actually knew and admired Turner. In fact, Ruskin and his father were regular patrons of Turner: they commissioned paintings and Ruskin was given intimate access to Turner’s work. As an art historian Robert Hewison told the Art newspaper‘s Ben Luke in 2019: “Turner showed him the sketches and said, ‘What do you think about this, do you want me to develop this into a finished painting?’ And Ruskin would see the imaginative processes.

Although Ruskin made art, he devoted most of his career to writing about it, including defending Turner’s work. Per ArtnetRuskin once called Turner “the greatest painter of all time, a man whose supremacy of power no intellect of centuries past can compare with.”

When Christie’s received the watercolor, Turner was an expert Peter Bower concluded that the paper matched other Turner paintings of Venice. Another Turner scholar, Ian Warrellconfirmed the origin of the painting.

The new attribution of the work makes it considerably more valuable, Jarvie says Art newspaper that a Turner painting is worth about ten times more money than a Ruskin. In 2023, a Turner watercolor sold for more than $1 million. Jarvie recites the estimate The approach to Venice “must provoke competition.”