Sotheby’s gets the consignment for a Turner painting owned by the same family for 136 years and on loan to Scotland for the last 40 years. The picture is owned by the Earl of Rosebery and is estimated at between £15 and £20m in Sotheby’s December Old Masters sale in London:

The painting, entitled Rome, from Mount Aventine, set a record price of £6,000 last time it sold, but has remained in the same family since 1878.

Considered an “extraordinary” example of the painter’s work, and one of fewer than 10 Turner painting still in private collections, it will now go up for sale for only the second time in its history.

A spokesman for the Rosebery family, its current owner, said: “During the first hundred years we owned this picture, it hung alongside its sister picture of Modern Rome in pride of place in our homes – first in London and later at Mentmore in Buckinghamshire.

“For the last forty years or so, the painting has been on loan to major museums, and we have drawn much pleasure from knowing that so many people have had the opportunity to see and enjoy it.

“Now, in order to maintain the estates for which we are responsible, and to safeguard their future, we have made the decision to sell it.

Turner’s Rome masterpiece to go on sale at Sotheby’s  (Telegraph)