A JMW Turner painting that was considered one of his finest to still be in private hands will leave the UK unless more than £18m can be found.
The arts minister Michael Ellis has placed a temporary export bar on the painting Ehrenbreitstein, first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1835 and which shows a magnificent ruined fortress perched on a cliff overlooking the Rhine near Koblenz, Germany.
It was one of only six major Turner paintings owned privately and appeared at auction last April, selling to an overseas buyer. The temporary export bar allows time for a UK buyer to meet the asking price of £18,533,750, plus VAT of £306,750.
Expert Lowell Libson, a member of the committee that advises the government, described it as “magnificent and beautifully preserved” and “one of Turner’s finest works of the period”.
The committee made its recommendation on the grounds of the painting’s “outstanding significance” for the study of its status as a literary landscape and as a painting made primarily for engraving.
The painting is based on material Turner collected when he visited the area in 1833 and is the only painting Turner produced of Ehrenbreitstein in oil. Ellis said said it was a painting that demonstrated Turner’s “extraordinary skill” depicting light, as well as the close relationship between painting and poetry.
“I very much hope that it can remain in the UK, where it can be admired and appreciated by future generations for many years to come,” he added.
The chances of such a large amount of money being raised are slim. In 2015-16, ministers imposed 21 temporary export bars on artworks, nine of which, worth £7m, were saved from going abroad.
