Cool Finds

This Long-Lost Landscape Painted by a Teenage J.M.W. Turner Was Found Hiding in Plain Sight

Showcasing the Romantic artist’s early innovations with oil paint, “The Rising Squall” could fetch up to $400,000. Before it was reattributed, it sold for just $506 at auction last year

Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent

June 12, 2025

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Early last year, an oil painting by a “follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson” sold for $506 at Dreweatts, an auction house in England.

Although it fell a few hundred dollars short of the pre-sale estimate, the final price wasn’t too shabby for an 18th-century painting by an unknown artist that languished under “a subtle craquelure and a yellowing varnish,” per the auction house.

But as experts touched up the discolored image of a building between stormy skies and rough waters, they came across a signature in the lower left corner of the canvas. That signature—belonging to J.M.W. Turner—changed everything.

With a fresh attribution to the famed British Romantic artist, the painting, now known as The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St. Vincent’s Rock, Bristol, is heading back to auction at Sotheby’s, where it is expected to fetch between roughly $270,000 and $400,000 on July 2.

“We are as certain as it’s possible to be that this painting is by Turner,” Julian Gascoigne, a senior director at Sotheby’s, tells the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood. Gascoigne adds that the painting has been examined by “all the leading Turner scholars alive today who unanimously endorsed the attribution.”

The Rising Squall is not just any Turner painting. Likely painted in 1792—when Turner was just 17—the work was Turner’s first oil painting ever exhibited.

After its debut at the Royal Academy in 1793, it fell victim to faulty cataloging and mistaken attributions. It remained in private collections, away from the public’s discerning eye, for more than 150 years. As the art world celebrates Turner’s 250th birthday this year, The Rising Squall offers new insight into the artist’s early years and development.

The painting depicts Hot Wells House, a hot spring and spa built along the Avon River in Bristol, which Turner saw and sketched during a tour of the West Country in 1791. That sketch served as the basis for a watercolor, which revealed Turner’s tendency to romanticize his subjects. A tiled roof, for instance, becomes a thatched one.

But the oil rendition of the Hot Wells House “takes this romanticism a stage further,” as Sotheby’s writes in the lot listing. In this version, the River Avon appears to be a wild sea. The hill behind the building is pulled up into the storming clouds. A man sprints away from the water with his arms flailing.

The artwork is a “fascinating document of the young artist’s mind and ambitions at a crucial moment in his development,” Andrew Wilton, a curator and Turner scholar, writes in Turner Society News, per Sotheby’s.

His early innovations with oil paint make The Rising Squall stand out even more. Instead of applying thick globs of paint to the canvas, Turner painted multiple layers of a thin, watery oil paint mixture. This revolutionary technique—which Turner would revisit later in his career with great success—allowed forms to break down into near abstractions with the wispy character of watercolor. As Wilton writes, The Rising Squall represents “the feverish inventiveness of an adolescent bursting with ideas.”

Around the time of painting The Rising Squall, Turner was under the tutelage of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a French émigré painter who strongly influenced Turner’s composition. De Loutherbourg’s 1793 painting The Shipwreck, for instance, shows great similarities to The Rising Squall, complete with tilting masts, crashing waves and fleeing onlookers.

Turner’s early oil painting earned a spot at the Royal Academy just three days after his 18th birthday. In an obituary for Turner, a critic for the Athenaeum recalled The Rising Squall fondly, noting that Turner took a popular subject and treated it “with a poet’s eye and a painter’s hand,” per Sotheby’s.

It was purchased by the Reverend Robert Nixon, a client of Turner’s barber father and an early supporter of the young painter’s artistic abilities. After Nixon’s death in 1837, the painting went to his son, Francis Russell Nixon, who brought the painting halfway around the world when he was appointed first Lord Bishop of Tasmania.

There, the painting was effectively out of the public eye, except for two shows on the island’s capital city, Hobart. Even then, the painting began to fall “into obscurity,” Gascoigne tells BBC News’ Leigh Boobyer. At the first Tasmanian showing, it was titled Landscape (The Rising Squall); by the second, it was just Landscape.

Back in England, the painting was entirely out of sight and almost entirely out of mind until Nixon returned and put it up for auction in 1864. Scholars who weren’t alive for the 1793 showing at the Royal Academy mistook the setting for Rochester Castle (which Turner also painted that same year) and assumed the medium was watercolor.

Since that auction 161 years ago, the painting had remained in private hands in England until it was sold under a mistaken attribution last year.

The discovery of Turner’s signature and the subsequent confirmation that The Rising Squall was Turner’s first exhibited oil painting upends scholars’ previous assumption that Fishermen at Sea, which was displayed in 1796, was his first.

“It gives us a real insight into the ambition that Turner was clearly exhibiting at this early stage of his career, and shows a level of competency in oil painting, which is quite a technical medium,” Gascoigne tells the Guardian. “It changes a lot of what we know, or thought we knew, about Turner’s early work and our understanding of how his technique and style evolved.”

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.