The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol

Turner's first oil painting to be publicly exhibited, shown at the Royal Academy in 1793 as number 323 when he was seventeen, and then lost for a hundred and sixty years because the standard reference work filed it in the wrong medium. It is the only oil painting Turner is believed to have made of a Bristol subject.

On 4 April 2024 it sold at Dreweatts in Newbury as lot 23, catalogued as a follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson and titled House by the Water in a Stormy Sky, for a total of GBP 524.80 including fees. The buyer suspected Philip James de Loutherbourg. Cleaning uncovered the signature W Turner at the lower left. On 2 July 2025 the same canvas was lot 28 at Sotheby's in London: GBP 1.5 m under the hammer, about GBP 1.9 m with premium, against an estimate of GBP 200,000 to 300,000.

Bristol tried to buy it back. More than 1,700 people gave GBP 109,120 in a week, past a GBP 100,000 target. It was not close to enough. The picture went to a private United Kingdom collector, the donations were refunded, and the work was seen again at Tate Britain that November.

The loss was a filing error

An oil on canvas, 59.8 by 74 centimetres, signed at the lower left W Turner. It shows the Hot Wells spa and St Vincent's Rock on the River Avon at Bristol under a squall coming up the gorge, painted decades before the Clifton Suspension Bridge crossed the view. Turner was seventeen. It hung at the Royal Academy at Somerset House from 29 April to 8 June 1793 as catalogue number 323, weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

Nothing about that record was ever lost. The catalogue number survived, the title survived, the Royal Academy year survived. What was lost was the medium. For most of the twentieth century the standard register of Turner's exhibited works listed this picture among his paintings in water colours, and so nobody hunting for an early Turner oil ever went looking for it. The object was not hidden. It was indexed under the wrong heading, which for a work of art is a more durable form of disappearance than being hidden.

Bristol, 1791, and the Prince of the Rocks

Turner was sixteen in 1791 when he went to stay in Bristol with the family of John Narraway, a glue maker and dealer in animal skins who was an old friend of his father. He took a sketchbook, now the Bristol and Malmesbury sketchbook in the Turner Bequest, and filled it with carefully worked views in pencil and watercolour intended as models for finished compositions. He gave a sequence of them titles, planning twelve views on the River Avon.

He spent so much time working along the cliffs of the Avon Gorge that the Narraways nicknamed him the Prince of the Rocks. That is the whole answer to why a London barber's son was painting Bristol: a family friend, a spare room, and a gorge that gave a boy trained on topography the most theatrical piece of scenery within reach of his father's house.

Hot Wells was a spa built where a warm spring rose at the foot of St Vincent's Rock, at the bottom of the gorge on the Avon. It was a resort. Turner painted it in weather, which is not what a resort view is for, and that is the first sign in his exhibited work of the thing he was later celebrated for.

Everything hangs on the word oil

Richard and Samuel Redgrave, in their Dictionary of Artists of the English School, described this picture as an oil. In their later Century of Painters of the English School they withdrew it, and named a different work, Moonlight, a study at Millbank of 1797, as Turner's first exhibited oil instead. In 1901 C. F. Bell, compiling the fullest list then made of everything Turner had ever put into a public exhibition, followed the second opinion. He noted the Redgraves' reversal in his entry, wrote that there was good reason to suppose the Millbank picture was the first exhibited oil, and placed The rising squall as number 8 of Section I of his catalogue: Paintings in Water Colours.

That is the sentence that cost the picture a century. Bell's list was the reference. A scholar checking what Turner exhibited in 1793 found the entry exactly where it should be, correctly numbered, and correctly attached to Royal Academy 323, sitting in the watercolour section without dimensions and without a medium. Later scholarship moved the honour again, from the 1797 Millbank study to Fishermen at Sea of 1796, which is still what most published biographies of Turner say. Three different pictures have held the title of Turner's first exhibited oil since the 1860s. This is the fourth answer, and it is the original one.

The earliest critical notice of the work is friendly to it. Peter Cunningham, in his memoir of Turner, wrote of the 1793 exhibit that it evinced for the first time that mastery of effect for which the painter was by then so justly celebrated. He was writing about a picture he believed was a watercolour.

Lot 23 at Newbury

On 4 April 2024 the canvas was lot 23 at Dreweatts at Donnington Priory, Newbury. The catalogue gave it as a follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson and titled it House by the Water in a Stormy Sky. It made GBP 524.80 including fees; the hammer figure has been reported as GBP 400, and the sale is almost universally rounded in the press to GBP 500.

The buyer did not think it was an Ibbetson. He thought it might be Philip James de Loutherbourg, and that guess is better than it looks. Bell devotes a passage of his introduction to the oil paintings to exactly this question, noting that De Loutherbourg's influence was sometimes supposed to have been powerfully felt by Turner in his youth. A buyer looking at a stormy English river landscape of about 1790 and reaching for De Loutherbourg was reaching for the name that Turner scholarship itself reaches for.

Cleaning settled it. The signature W Turner is at the lower left. Andrew Wilton published the identification in Turner Society News in spring 2025 under the title Turner's First Exhibited Oil. Julian Gascoigne, the Sotheby's senior specialist, said the picture changes a good deal of what is known about Turner's early work.

Two pieces of Turner Bequest material support the reading independently of the signature. The 1791 Bristol and Malmesbury sketchbook holds the source drawings, and a pencil and watercolour study, Back View of the Hot Wells, Bristol, catalogued by Tate as very probably one of the bases for the 1793 exhibit, sits in the collection with the same weather in it.

Tasmania and back

The chain from 1793 is unusually good at the top and unusually blank at the bottom. The Reverend Robert Nixon of Foots Cray in Kent, a friend and early patron, bought it from Turner directly in 1793. It passed to his son, the Reverend Dr Francis Russell Nixon, who became the first Lord Bishop of Tasmania, and it went to the other side of the world with him. It was shown in Hobart twice: at the Legislative Council Chambers in January and February 1845, and at Runnymede House in 1858.

Then it came back. Joseph Hogarth acquired it around 1862 to 1864 and offered it at Christie's in London on 9 July 1864 as lot 152, where it did not sell. That is the last time the picture is recorded in public before 2024. From there Sotheby's traces it only to a private collection in Northamptonshire and thence by descent, with no names and no dates, until it was consigned anonymously to Newbury.

The commonly quoted gap of about 150 years is measured from the 1858 Hobart exhibition. Measured from the last saleroom appearance it is 160 years, and the Northamptonshire century inside it is a genuine blank, not a summary.

Lot 28 at Sotheby's

Sotheby's offered it in the Old Master and 19th Century Paintings evening sale in London on 2 July 2025, sale L25033, lot 28, estimated at GBP 200,000 to 300,000. It was on public view from 28 June to 1 July.

The hammer fell at GBP 1.5 m. With buyer's premium the total was about GBP 1.9 m, which is the figure nearly all the coverage prints without saying which of the two it is; GBP 1.87 m also circulated, and dollar conversions of about USD 2.6 m depend on the day. The buyer was a private collector in the United Kingdom. The number of competing bidders is reported as four in one account and five in another that then itemises four, two in the room, one on the telephone and one absentee.

Against the GBP 524.80 paid in Newbury fifteen months earlier, the premium-inclusive result is a multiple of roughly 3,600. That multiple is not a judgement about the picture. Both salerooms were looking at the same object in the same condition apart from a cleaning. The multiple measures the value of a correctly spelled name.

Bristol raised the money and lost anyway

This is the part that most accounts get backwards, including summaries that say the appeal failed.

Bristol City Council resolved to bid, and the Bristol Museums Development Trust, an independent charity, launched a public appeal on about 23 June 2025 with a target of GBP 100,000 and a deadline of 23:59 on 1 July, the night before the sale. Phillip Walker, the council's head of culture, put the case plainly: it is the first and probably the only oil painting Turner ever made of a Bristol scene. The crowdfund was to be topped up from trusts, foundations and private donors to get the trust somewhere near the GBP 300,000 high estimate.

The target was hit in five days by more than 1,400 donors giving between GBP 2 and GBP 15,000. By the close the Bring Turner Home appeal stood at GBP 109,120 from more than 1,700 people. Kate Newnham, senior curator of visual arts at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, called the response overwhelming and said it showed what access to art and culture means to people.

Bristol was the only public institution bidding. The picture then sold for more than six times its high estimate, and no amount of crowdfunding at that scale was ever going to reach GBP 1.5 m. Every donation was refunded, though the trust reported that many donors asked for their money to be kept as a general gift instead. The appeal did not fail. It succeeded and was outbid, which is a different fact about the British museum funding system and a more useful one.

Where it is now

The work is in a private collection in the United Kingdom. Because the buyer is British, no export licence application arose and no deferral or national treasure procedure was triggered; none of the sources consulted records any export question at all. That is worth stating explicitly, because it is the mechanism that saved the Cimabue panel and it simply did not engage here. A domestic private sale is invisible to the export control system.

The picture was requested for Tate Britain's Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals, 27 November 2025 to 12 April 2026, at the time of the sale, and Tate's own press material named it as a recently discovered work in the show. The lender has not been identified publicly. So within five months of the hammer the painting was on a public wall in London, which is more than the Bristol coverage implied when the appeal closed.

The trust has said it is exploring whether the painting could come to Bristol on loan. Nothing in the sources consulted records that it has.

The exhibition ran its full course and closed on schedule, 12 April 2026, with no further reporting on the loan, the lender or a Bristol showing. One dated detail from inside the run: King Charles III toured the exhibition after hours on Tuesday 10 March 2026 and stopped at this painting specifically, saying "wow" and "That really is marvellous" before asking the curator how many more such rediscoveries might be "lurking in Australia or something" - a reference to the picture's documented time in Tasmania. The anecdote confirms the loan went ahead as planned; it says nothing about who lent it.