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Dr Hamilton told The Guardian: “They had no way of knowing who the portrait might be by if it wasn’t by Turner and of course it was too good to lose. So it was lumped in with the rest.
“But it was never, even on early lists, a ‘self-portrait’. It was always a ‘portrait of Turner’. Gradually, over the years, it became an assumption that it was by him.”
The biographer said he did not believe the portrait had the hallmarks of the style of the much-loved artist, who gave his name to the controversial Turner Prize for work by British artists.
He said there was “nothing else like it” in Turner’s oeuvre, and the striking face of the 24-year-old emerging from a dark field matched the style of Opie, whose subjects included Mary Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke.
When Turner died in 1851, his paintings were passed to the public in a vast gift known as the Turner Bequest, with most work going to Tate Britain, where Self-Portrait is still held.
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