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

In the spring of 1793 the Royal Academy in London hung an oil painting by a boy not yet 18. Turner had made it the year before, on a trip west to Bristol, where he sketched the cliffs of the Avon Gorge. He shows Hot Wells House, a fashionable spa below St Vincent's Rock, with a squall coming up the river and the light already shifting over the water. It was the first oil he ever showed in public, and then for roughly 150 years no one knew where it was. In 2024 it surfaced at a country saleroom near London, darkened under old varnish and catalogued as the work of a follower of another painter, and sold for a few hundred pounds. A restorer cleaning it found Turner's signature in the lower left corner. The next year it sold at auction in London for 1.9 million pounds.