Lost Turner masterpiece sells for £50,000 after it was sold in £100 job lot and hung on oblivious couple’s dining room wall for 30 years

A ‘lost’ JMW Turner masterpiece, bought for just £100 and hung on an oblivious couple’s dining room wall, has now sold for almost £50,000.

The lucky owners unknowingly bought the watercolor by the famous English artist at a sale in a Georgian mansion in the 1990s.

The married couple hung it on their dining room wall for 30 years without realizing the importance of the beautiful depiction of St David’s Cathedral in Wales.

Although the painting was signed W Turner on the back, they never thought it was by Joseph Mallory William Turner, one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century whose work sold for up to 30 million of pounds sterling.

It has now been sold at Cheffins, the Cambridge-based auction house, for a hammer price of £37,000. With fees added, the successful bidder paid £48,000.

The painting, said to be in “perfect condition”, depicts the entrance to Bishop Vaughan’s Chapel in St David’s Cathedral and is the only completed architectural study by Turner on this subject.

The couple decided to put the painting up for auction after going on a family vacation. in Pembrokeshire in 2022 when they visited St David’s Cathedral – the subject of Turner’s masterpiece.

After visiting the location at the heart of their beloved painting, the couple browsed the website of London’s TATE Glore Gallery, which houses 300 oil paintings and thousands of Turner’s sketches and watercolors.

And they found a preparatory drawing of the same painting, confirming to them that it was indeed one of Turner’s lost masterpieces.

The 13-by-9.5-inch watercolor has since been authenticated as a Turner original.

The couple chose Cheffins after selling a Turner painting of Chepstow Castle for almost double its estimate in March last year. So they decided to contact the auction house about their discovery.

Patricia Cross, from Cheffins, said: “This piece is an important new discovery which provides insight into Turner’s early development as an artist.

“It is a wonderful example of his architectural drawing in which he demonstrates his extraordinary attention to detail and imaginative understanding of light and dark.

“It is inspired by one of Turner’s first tours of Wales as a professional artist and would have been made as a presentation piece for one of his clients, back in his London studio.

“The discovery of this new addition to Turner’s early works together with the resurfacing of the previously unpublished Chepstow watercolor from a similar period, which we sold last year for £93,000, shows that early Turner’s watercolors are increasingly highlighted.

“This is the true definition of a ‘dormant’ auction house, and we were privileged to be able to offer it to the market.”

This was verified by Andrew Wilton, Turner specialist and the Clore Gallery’s first curator for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain.

One of the owners, who remains anonymous, said: “We bought it as a lot of paintings at a house sale in Suffolks in the early 1990s.

“The painting had hung in our dining room for over 30 years. We periodically discussed that the painting might be by Turner, but we didn’t take it further.

“After a trip to Wales in 2022, where we visited St David’s Cathedral, our interest in our photography was reignited. At this point we turned to the TATE Clore Gallery website and discovered Turner’s sketch of our watercolor.

Turner left thousands of paintings and sketches to the nation when he died in 1851 and in the Tate archives is the South Wales Sketchbook, which includes a similar but less developed drawing of the chapel.