Council’s £100k appeal to buy lost Turner painting for Bristol

A council has launched a one-week fundraiser to return JMW Turner’s earliest-known oil painting “to its home”.

Bristol City Council, which owns Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, is trying to raise £100,000 to help purchase The Rising Squall, which depicts the Avon George.

The painting had been lost for 150 years before it was rediscovered last year.

Phillip Walker, head of culture for Bristol City Council, said: “It’s an incredibly important and relevant painting for Bristol because it’s the very first and probably only oil painting that Turner ever painted of a Bristol scene.”

“This is the very first oil painting he ever painted… what’s more incredible is that he was only 17 at the time,” Mr Walker added.

The guide price for the painting is £300,000, and the council hopes to raise the rest of the money from other sources before the auction on 2 July.

Mr Walker said the council is “putting all of its feelers out” to “try and raise the money it can to stand a chance at bidding”.

The painting was debuted at the Royal Academy in 1793, three days after Turner’s 18th birthday, before being bought by Reverend Robert Nixon, a customer of Turner’s father’s barber shop.

Mr Nixon’s son inherited the painting after his death, and it then fell “into obscurity”, having last been exhibited in Tasmania, Australia.

If the council is unsuccessful in purchasing Turner’s work, it said all of the money that has been donated will be returned.

“We want to make this work, so we’re asking anyone who can to help and share the enthusiasm and the opportunity,” Mr Walker said.

“This really is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Bristol to show how important art and culture are to it.”