Turner's Rome, from Mount Aventine, one of the artist's great Roman views, leads Sotheby's winter Old Master evening on New Bond Street.
J.M.W. Turner’s Rome, from Mount Aventine leads the Old Master and 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction at Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in Mayfair on Wednesday 9 December 2026.
Turner based the picture on sketches from his visit to Rome in 1828. He probably began it there and finished it in London for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1836. His patron Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro commissioned it.
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, later acquired it for his wife, Hannah de Rothschild. It stayed with the Rosebery family for more than a century. In 2014 it sold at Sotheby’s for $47.6 million, then an auction record for the artist.
The picture has had one owner since, and its condition is unusually fine. Turner’s method stays legible: oil laid down in translucent glazes as if it were watercolour, then worked with heavy impasto, the palette knife and, at times, his fingers.
Sotheby’s held its first sale in London in 1744. The evening opens its December Old Masters Week, which runs to 11 December, and the lots hang in the galleries from 3 December.