Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino

This is Turner's final painting of Rome and the last work in a twenty-year series of Roman views he developed from studies made on two visits to the city — in 1819 and 1828. The Campo Vaccino, meaning 'cow pasture,' was the common name for the unexcavated Roman Forum, whose ruins still served as grazing land in Turner's time. Turner first exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1839, where it was purchased directly from the exhibition by Hugh Munro of Novar, a Scottish landowner and one of Turner's closest friends and patrons. After Munro's death in 1864 the painting passed through his estate, and in 1878 it was purchased for 4,450 guineas by Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery — later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom — and his wife Hannah Rothschild, the wealthiest woman in Britain, on their honeymoon. The painting hung in the Rosebery family's homes, including Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, and was loaned to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1978. On 7 July 2010 it was sold at Sotheby's London for £29.7 million — a record price for Turner at the time — purchased by the dealer Hazlitt Gooden and Fox acting for the J. Paul Getty Museum. The UK government placed an export bar on the painting to allow British institutions time to match the price; no institution was able to do so, and the Getty received its export licence on 3 February 2011.