Culture Minister David Lammy Defers Export Licence For ‘Outstanding’ Watercolour By JMW Turner, The Blue Rigi

118/06

Culture Minister, David Lammy, has placed a temporary export bar on a watercolour by JMW Turner, The Blue Rigi. This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep the painting in the United Kingdom.

The Minister’s ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The Committee recommended that the export decision be deferred on the grounds that the painting is of outstanding aesthetic importance and that it is of outstanding significance for the study of the work of JMW Turner and, in particular, his final masterpieces. The Committee awarded a starred rating to the painting meaning that every possible effort should be made to raise enough money to keep it in the country.

This work is part of a final group of Swiss studies by Turner, generally considered to be among his finest sustained bodies of work in watercolour. It demonstrates his consummate technical skill and inventiveness and has long been considered one of the highest attainments of his career. The existence of preparatory sketches of the Rigi in the Turner Bequest at Tate provides an exciting context for the study of this work.

The decision on the export licence application for the painting will be deferred for a period ending on 20 November 2006 inclusive. This period may be extended until 20 March 2007 inclusive if a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase the painting at the recommended price of £5,832,000 excluding VAT (£5,942,600 including VAT) is expressed.

Offers from public bodies for less than the recommended price through the private treaty sale arrangements, where appropriate, may also be considered by David Lammy. Such purchases frequently offer substantial financial benefit to both parties by the sharing of tax advantages.

Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the painting should contact the owner’s agent through:

The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council,
Victoria House,
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4EA

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NOTES TO EDITORS

1. Media enquiries on the operation of and casework arising from the work of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) should be directed to MLA Media Relations Manager, Ruth Evans, on 020 7273 1459, email ruth.evans@mla.gov.uk

2. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest is an independent body, run by MLA, which advises the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on whether a cultural object, intended for export, is of national importance under specified criteria. Where the Committee finds that an object meets one or more of the criteria, it will normally recommend that the decision on the export licence application should be deferred for a specified period. An offer may then be made from within the United Kingdom at or above the fair market price.

3. Pictures of these items are available. Please email: ruth.evans@mla.gov.uk or sharene.chatfield@mla.gov.uk (*MLA no longer subscribes to the PixMedia website service).

4. Throughout Turner’s lifetime, he was consistently acclaimed for his work in watercolour, and, indeed, his peers cherished him as the prime mover in the establishment of a native school of watercolour painting at the end of the eighteenth century. His works on paper can be seen to have had a far wider influence on succeeding generations than the majority of his larger finished images in oils. Even today, for example, the Royal Academy of Arts offers a Turner award to the most favoured work in watercolour in the annual exhibition.

5. Turner’s final watercolours were produced for a group of collectors made up of Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797-1864), Elhanan Bicknell (1788-1861), Benjamin Godfrey Windus (1790-1867), together with the critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and his father. By producing watercolours of Swiss scenes for a circle of patrons drawn largely from the newly-wealthy mercantile and industrial classes, Turner was assuming the mantle of Canaletto and other earlier view-makers, who had sated the taste of the milordi visiting Rome, Florence and Venice. His Swiss works are, therefore, important as the finest of the kinds of visual souvenirs acquired by these heirs of the Grand Tour. As Ruskin noted, Turner’s watercolours recorded the beauties of the Swiss landscape at the crucial moment of transition, and often included what he thought were unsightly new tourist hotels.

6. Turner’s use of the full range of the processes available to him was one of the characteristics that especially recommended his late Swiss scenes to the critic Martin Hardie, who singled them out in his landmark survey of British watercolours: ‘In the Rigi drawings he is the insuperable master of technique. He used every possible manipulation of brush, colour and paper, every device, every weapon in his armoury, sponging, rubbing, washing, stippling, hatching, touching and retouching, to express the vibration and radiation of light. Light was his theme’.

7. Turner’s decision to unify his designs around a specific tone or colour was greatly in advance of his period, and anticipates some of the products of the Aesthetic Movement, as well as the sketching campaigns of Monet and Cezanne, who similarly used a single motif as a means of exploring the inflected nuances of light and colour.

8. The Turner Bequest at Tate Britain contains breathtaking views of the mountain in the ‘Lucerne’ sketchbook and dozens of colour sketches – some still in the process of identification – which testify to the energy with which Turner stalked his subject. These also reveal the many patient hours of contemplative scrutiny that lie behind the sequence of three watercolours in the finished group. The possibility of studying The Blue Rigi in the context of these enhances its importance for the purposes of study.

9. The work measures 29.7 x 45 cm and is in excellent condition

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