Joseph Mallord William Turner come to the Art market

JMW Turner – Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne

Want a lovely landscape to hang in your bedroom? OK, face facts: for less than $2 million you can buy a nice Courbet, a medium quality Van Gogh drawing, or a low rate Monet canvas. Or you can buy yourself a masterful, colourful, almost abstract Turner watercolour that is, in other words, the pinnacle of the landscape representation. The reason? You tell me. I still don’t understand why the watercolours by the British master are so cheap.

All this can change next June, when Christie’s is expected to auction The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne , a spectacular watercolour by Turner that is expected to fetch in excess of £2 million. The breathtaking work, shown left, was much admired by Turner contemporaries such as John Ruskin, the famous writer and art critic. The current auction record for a Turner watercolour is a mere £2 million, fetched by Herleberg with a rainbow in 2001

But this work can be not the only auction record for a Turner work fetched this year, as next April, Christie’s -again- will auction Giudecca, la Donna della Salute and San Giorgio , a very desirable oil on canvas executed in 1841 by Joseph Mallord William Turner, that is expected to fetch more than $15 million -possibly much more, breaking the current auction record for a Turner work ($9 million for the supreme, almost abstract Seascape, Folkestone in 1984) and even for a British work of art (£10.7 million in 1990 for Constable’s The Lock , currently at the Thyssen collection)