News Archive

JMW Turner’s Bamborough Castle sells for £3m

30/01/2008

JMW Turner’s Bamborough Castle recently sold for just under £3m at Sotheby’s in London.
The canvas art of the walled Bamborough Castle in Northumberland was painted in the mid-1830s. It’s being sold by the Vanderbilt Family, which built a shipping and railroad fortune in the US in the 1880s. It’s owned the painting since about 1890.
The piece is part of a £4 billion sale that covers everything from impressionist-to-contemporary art.
Turner, who is famous for his fine art landscapes, has had mixed results in the auction houses lately.
While Las Vegas casino owner Stephen A. Wynne shelled out £70m for View of Venice last year, collectors kept their hands in the pockets in July this year when two works belonging to Belgian collector Guy Illens missed their low estimate of about £3m each.
The best display of Turner’s work is currently on display at Tate Britain. The BP Summer Exhibition Hockney on Turner Watercolours, opened in June and runs until February 2008.
Hockney, still one of the biggest names in British modern art, picked out 165 watercolours from the world’s largest collection of Turners.
The exhibition at Tate Britain will coincide with the major exhibition tour JMW Turner in the United States. The most comprehensive retrospective of Turner’s work to be exhibited in the USA, it will open at The National Gallery of Art in Washington on 1 October 2007 before touring to Dallas Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008.