The Rigi

In 1842, British artist J. M. W. Turner painted three watercolours of the Rigi, a mountain in the Alps in Central Switzerland, which he had visited the previous summer.

Munro of Novar and now held by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and The Dark Rigi, an early morning view, in a private collection.

Two “stars”, of which the brighter one often erroneously identified as Venus, glint in the yellow morning sky above, where paint has been scratched out with a fingernail to reveal the bright white ground.

After Bicknell's death, the painting was sold at Christie's in April 1863 for 296 guineas to the art dealer Agnew's, and resold a month later to John Edward Taylor (son of the founder of the Manchester Guardian).

After her death, The Blue Rigi was acquired for a third time by Agnew's at a Christie's auction, in July 1942, for 1,500 guineas, and sold to a private collector.

The work was auctioned for a fourth time at Christie's on 5 June 2006, achieving a sale price of £5,832,000 including buyer's premium, against an estimate of £2m.

The hammer price doubled the record for a British work on paper, previously set by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora at £2.6m in 2000.

A proposed sale to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was abandoned when the British government imposed a temporary export ban.

He used every possible manipulation of brush, colour and paper, every device, every weapon in his armoury, sponging, rubbing, washing, stippling, hatching, touching and retouching, to express the vibration and radiation of light.