Rome, depuis le mont Aventin

Turner had last stood on the Aventine hill years before he painted this view of Rome in 1835. He worked it up in London largely from memory and old sketches, dissolving the city into a golden morning haze where the domes and bridges barely hold their edges. He was 60, near the end of a long career, and pushing landscape further toward pure light than much of his public was ready for. For generations the picture stayed with the family that first bought it. When it finally came up at auction in London in December 2014, it sold for 30.3 million pounds, then the highest price ever paid for a work by Turner, and for any British painting made before 1900.