The only photographic portrait of JMW Turner has gone on public display for the first time at a fair in London.
The image from 1847 of one of Britain’s most celebrated painters has previously always been held in private collections. It was taken by the Lancashire-born photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall, who took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria in 1860.
The unique daguerreotype — the first publicly available photographic process which produced a holographic effect — is the only known photographic portrait of the painter.
It significantly resembles the painter’s self-portrait currently held in the Tate collection in London. Experts claim Mayall was attempting to create a photograph that corresponded with the self-portrait of the artist as a young man.
Both the photograph