THE MOST ELEGANT SEARCH ON THE PLANET

THE TURNER'S TREASUREHUNT FOR TURNERS

The background of this page is a reproduction of Turner's Raby Castle of 1820, a beautiful etching unrecorded in any catalogue outside The Turner Museum, with a group of horsemen and numerous hounds in the foreground getting ready for the chase. Ironically, its watercolor design is currently untraced - surely the most appropriate Turner masterpiece to kick off this hunt is - Raby Castle!

The hunt is on!
The multi-million dollar game is afoot!
The Turner Museum is sending out a clarion call for missing J.M.W.Turners

The ultimate treasureHunt!

There are numerous genuine Turners missing - gone AWOL=absent without leave, to use a military term. Even after the lapse of two centuries, the number of missing Turners tend to increase rather than decrease. The encyclopedic Butlin and Joll Turner painting and Wilton's watercolor catalogues eulogized in our new biographical sketch of Turner (please click HERE etc.) list a great number of Turners as "untraced" or "present whereabouts unknown".

Additionally, new Turners are being discovered from time to time and occasionally we learn about some Turners which appear "out of the blue".
The explanation behind these happy series of discoveries is quite simple: J.M.W.Turner was one of the most fecund/productive artists of all time - his works are his diary, his matchless autobiography. The Turner estimates he may have produced as many as 40,000 works over his long career of 60+ years of almost non-stop creativity. (One museum in London alone is a treasure-chest overflowing with more than 22,000 Turner items!) 40,000 over 60 years, spread over some 22,000 days allowed Turner to produce about two creations per day. Considering that Turner was known to have tossed off as many as half a dozen watercolors in one go and considering we know that on more than one occasion he has scribbled a dozen or more on-the run notations into his always handy sketch-book during a single day's bone-jarring journey in a horse-drawn carriage, that is perhaps not an overly ambitious estimate.

Yes - as we point out in our Appraisal Service page in the section called A Warning to Turner Collectors (Please click HERE etc.) there is a sea of bogus Turners out there. Even if we can fish out just a few genuine Turners out of the sea of fakes, our educational efforts will be well rewarded!

The stakes are enormous!

How enormous?

They put the prizes on popular TV shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and PBS's Antiques Road Show in the shade.

Consider the following:
Turner painting and watercolor masterpieces have shattered world records in prices realized at public auction at least three times in the last quarter century - starting the current trend toward MEGA-prices for the works of old masters.

What is The Turner doing about this situation?

We are inaugurating

THE TURNER'S REGISTER OF MISSING TURNERS

This inter-active Register is named The Grandest TreasureHunt in the World and is now a permanent and continually evolving exhibition in our Galleries (Please click HERE for access) Initially we feature our favorite carefully selected ten missing Turners.

YOU are invited to log your mystery Turner onto this Register- the cost is only a $100 donation to The Turner Museum - as we are a non-profit public trust (Please click HERE for more).this donation is tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law, Should your submission prove to be a genuine Turner to the satisfaction of the Trustees of The Turner Museum, your donation if requested will be refunded immediately.

Do not hesitate to send your prints as well -- black-and-white or colored -- for inclusion in the Register, particularly items bearing a Turner studio blind-stamp - a beautiful, compact and artistic rendering of Turner's four initials - JMWT. Think in terms of a public notary stamp but much smaller, no bigger than a fingernail.- hence hard to see and easily overlooked - a slightly enlarged version appears at the bottom of each page on this web-site. The Turner blindstamp was impressed in the lower margin of each and every print when the 70,000 or so found in Turner's studio were sold at auction in the 19th century. These are often the finest and most desirable impressions which he routinely demanded as part of his compensation for closely supervising the production of his prints.(Please click HERE for more) These he kept for his own collection. Many of them carry no inscription whatsoever - none!

Now we come to the prints hardest to detect - the prints Turner personally annotated with his own corrections during the print-making process. The trade calls them euphemistically "touched" proofs. Turner made his corrections with a lead pencil or white chalk: - often accompanied by a helpful sketch in the margin of the image - to clarify exactly what the correction meant.. For a stunning example of a correction in chalk please click HERE. Again, identification is extremely difficult as the proofs Turner worked on usually carry no inscriptions whatsoever (beyond Turner's) like titles - occasionally "J.M.W.Turner" and a date is very faintly visible under the image. Turner has often made up to half-a-dozen or more corrections on a single print - thus The Turner estimates up to 5,000 or more do exist - many are in museums including this one, but many, possibly a thousand or more, await discovery!

Last but not least - we come to the most exciting part of this treasureHunt - Turner's missing sketch-books. Yes, entire sketchbooks with as many as 100 or more pages! Discovery of the last sketch book is known to have occurred around 1985. This is the opening sentence of a detailed article on the discovery by Andrew Wilton, one of the world's leading Turner luminaries. That sketchbook had 88 leaves (176 pages), with the cover measuring 101x155 mm. and the inside crammed with wondrous free-flowing color-studies!

Please send as much information as you can, including a full description, a good photograph or transparency, the size in centimeters or inches and a brief account on how you or your family came to ownership. Kindly understand that a final/authoritative judgment on a submission must depend on a physical examination of the item submitted - as you can well imagine, no appraiser worth his/her salt will ever consider any alternative procedure unless in our judgment it is obviously not by Turner based on your own photographic evidence.

PLEASE note carefully we offer three super-cool incentives to YOU:

1. Cash or a gift-certificate for a spending spree in the Turner Gallery - the museum's gift store (Please click HERE for more) - the amount and nature depending on the importance, size and quality of the find - you will find at all times we will at least attempt to be fair, depending of course that the item submitted is a genuine Turner, based solely on our opinion. Of course if you are not satisfied, you can withdraw immediately your listing from the Register. You can be assured of our fairness as only our fairness (and your contributions!) will insure the quality and success of this exciting enterprise!

2. Absolute/unconditional confidentiality - any information submitted to the Registery via the Internet will be immediately taken off the Internet and thus will be hacker-proof. All credible data submitted will be deposited with our attorney in a sealed envelope, marked on the outside only with a registration number.

3. Satisfaction - a glow of good feeling for participating in the WORLD'S

GREATEST TREASUREHUNT - the search for missing Turner masterpieces.

YOU may contact us by
(a) good old-fashioned mail. - our address is PO Box18133 Sarasota, FL 34231-8133
(b) by telephone or fax - our number for both is 941-924-5622, and
(c) by email - our address is [email protected]

GOOD hunting!
Lets have some fun!
To begin your very own hunt, browse over our new exhibition:

The Grandest TreasureHunt in the World

please click HERE for more!