J. M.W. Turner’s Rediscovered Painting

In the volatile cartography of the art market, rediscoveries carry the weight of revelations: sudden apertures that redraw the contours of an artist’s history. Such was the case this summer at Sotheby’s, when The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol (1792) re-emerged from more than 150 years of obscurity in a private collection and was sold for £1.9 million, far surpassing its estimate of £200,000–300,000. More than an auction triumph, the event reconfigures Turner’s early career: the work is now recognized as the first oil painting he ever exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1793, three years before the famous Fishermen at Sea (1796).

The painting’s story is steeped in contingency and erasure. Long believed lost, The Rising Squall surfaced only last year when restoration revealed Turner’s signature beneath the patina. Previously misattributed and thought to be a watercolour, the work had slipped from scholarly discourse and from Turner’s canonical corpus. Its reappearance does more than add a line to the catalogue: it challenges long-held assumptions about the artist’s development, revealing a precocious mastery of oil that upends the chronology of his oeuvre.

The canvas depicts Hot Wells House in Bristol, a Georgian spa and locus of social life, yet Turner refracts this seemingly placid subject through a turbulent lens. The waters of the Avon are transformed into a stage of elemental drama, the architectural setting dissolving into atmosphere, while human figures are diminished before the force of weather. Even at seventeen, Turner treated landscape not as backdrop but as theatre: a space where climate and form converge in luminous tension.

The provenance speaks to Turner’s early circle. Likely acquired by the Reverend Robert Nixon, one of his first patrons, the work passed into private hands and resurfaced briefly at Christie’s in 1864 before disappearing once again. Its absence fed the critical misreading that positioned Fishermen at Sea as Turner’s first public oil. The correction is no small matter: it testifies to a more ambitious and technically assured Turner than previously imagined, announcing his artistic trajectory not in tentative sketches but in a bold public declaration.

The July 2025 sale revealed the dual dynamics of rediscovery: art-historical revision and market recalibration. Four determined bidders pushed the price to nearly ten times its upper estimate, a clear sign that the market responds not only to rarity but to works that redefine the narrative of an artist’s career. The outcome also underscores the fragile balance between institutional ambition and private collecting: Bristol’s museums attempted to secure the painting, but the pace of bidding quickly moved beyond their reach.

Yet the work’s future remains open. Its return to visibility coincides with the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, an occasion that has sparked renewed scholarly attention and curatorial projects worldwide. The Rising Squall will no doubt become a touchstone in this re-examination: an early canvas in which Turner already transforms weather into philosophy, atmosphere into metaphysics.

Ultimately, the rediscovery is less about filling a catalogue gap than about rewriting origins. It reminds us that Turner’s art, from its very first public showing, was not merely depiction but event: the storm that rises on the Avon in 1793 is also the storm of a new artistic voice, one that would redefine the Romantic landscape for centuries to come.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved