WILLIAM Turner's first exhbited oil painting – which came out of his 1792 trip to the West Country and Wye Valley – is to go up for auction after being lost for 150 years.

The landscape painter made his first ever artistic tour at the age of 17, sketching views of the likes of Tintern Abbey, and painting.

He crossed the Severn from Bristol to travel up the Wye, having sketched a picture of a former hot spring and spa seen from the east bank of the River Avon, before Clifton Suspension Bridge was built.

Painted in oil and named The Rising Squall, it made its debut at the Royal Academy in 1793, three days after Turner's 18th birthday, before being bought by Reverend Robert Nixon, a customer of his father's barber shop, reports BBC News.

Rev Nixon's son inherited the painting which then fell "into obscurity" having last been exhibited in Tasmania, Australia, in 1858, disappearling for a century and a half before reappearing in the UK, where his signature was revealed after it was cleaned last year.

Now it is set to be displayed at Sotheby's in London, between June 28 and July 1, before being auctioned with an estimated value of up to £300,000.

Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby's senior specialist, said: "It's a fascinating and very instructive insight into his early style."

It showed Turner, famed as a watercolourist, as a teenage artist with "ambition and skill" in his early experiments as an oil painter.

The teenage Turner, who also visted the Wye Valley again the following year (1793) created several artworks from visiting Tintern, and an arched abbey window based on his paintings currently features on the £20 note which carries his portrait.

A 1794 watercolour Chepstow Castle on the River Wye Monmouthshire Wales acquired by Monmouthshire Council in 2023 is also on public display at Chepstow Museum.

The view of the castle and riverside are the one that would have greeted him after arriving in the town by boat.