The British Museum is to sell a collection of paintings by English Romantic master J M W Turner in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
A total of 20 Turner watercolours will go on sale, as NFTs, next month – though their owners will have no claim to the physical paintings they resemble.
Purchased with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, NFTs serve as certificates of ownership for virtual assets, allowing an individual or group to prove that they possess the original digital file.
While anyone can copy that file to access a version of the asset in question, a record of who owns what is stored on a decentralised public ledger known as the blockchain, meaning ownership cannot be faked.
NFTs have generated a significant buzz, particularly in the art world, since artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold his piece Everydays – The First 5,000 Days at auction for $69.3m (£51.1m) last March.
Now, the British Museum has partnered with French NFT platform La Collection to sell digital versions of a variety of Turner paintings donated to the museum by the late Robert Wylie Lloyd, a former chairman of auction house Christies, it is understood.
Pieces include A Storm (Shipwreck), from 1823, and the 1829 work Messieurs les voyageurs on their return from Italy, according to The Times.
The paintings will fall into three categories, with the price of each NFT reflecting their rarity. Nine will be “ultra rare”, with just two NFTs available, one of which will belong to the museum itself; seven will be “super rare”, with 10 of each created; and four will be “open edition”, with no more than 99 going on sale.
The forthcoming sale follows a similar event in September, when the British Museum sold NFTs of works by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. The sale, also in partnership with La Collection, included editions of Hokusai’s most famous creation, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831).
Buyers who purchased Hokusai NFTs will get exclusive access to the Turner sale at the start of February before the event is opened up to the wider public.