Yesterday I Wrote A 'Good Luck' Story,

about a painting by Turner,

then today three of his works that were dismissed as 'the creation of ‘imitators’ or ‘workings-up . . . of rudimentary beginnings by Turner,', have been given a new lease of life, Joseph Mallord William Turner, the son of a barber and wigmaker, was born in London in 1775 and died in 1851, he never married but he had a long-term relationship with his landlady, Sophia Booth, a secret liaison that was to prove crucial to the fate of the seascapes, he stayed with her for the last 18 years of his life, but this did not sit well with his membership of the Royal Academy which he joined aged 14, ‘Royal Academicians were required to be of “fair moral character”,


so he took trouble to conceal her from his illustrious contemporaries, which meant that some of his latter works were dismissed, the subsequent discovery of the relationship caused dismay in the uptight Victorian art world, and the details – including the origin of the seascapes – were suppressed, even in the Fifties, when the paintings were donated to the National Museum Wales, the prejudice remained,


but now a revelation, today, the three oil paintings that have spent most of their lives locked away in cupboards and a basement can be revealed as genuine works by the British landscape genius J.M.W. Turner, the three works – The Beacon Light, Off Margate and Margate Jetty – were collectively worth a few thousand pounds at most, but now their value has soared to, wait for it, an estimated £16 million, if only one of my relatives had bought one on the cheap!

l Fake Or Fortune? is on BBC1 tonight at 7pm (except Scotland), the Turners will be on display  at the National Museum Wales from Tuesday.