LONDON: Auction house Sotheby's announced a valuable collection of watercolors by J.M.W. Turner is set to be auctioned in July.
The watercolors, assembled by the Belgian millionaire collector Baron Guy Ullens, may fetch as much as 15 million pounds, according to experts.
Turner, Britain's highest-priced artist, holds an auction record for a painting of 20.5 million pounds. His The Blue Rigi sold for 5.8 million pounds last year, more than any other work in that medium. Ullens, who had a highly successful food business, has bought 14 Turner pictures over 20 years. He is now focusing on building a stock of Chinese contemporary art and hence is selling the Turners, Sotheby's said.
The announcement has caused a major sensation in the art world, because it will be the finest collection of watercolors to be sold since the 1870s, two decades after Turner's death. Sotheby's has said the 14 watercolours represent almost every aspect of Turner's accomplishments. The collection covers four decades of Turner's life and includes one painted when he was 73. The painting, Lundgernzee, is believed to have been created three years before he died in 1851. It may get as much as three million pounds at the auction. Others include Oberwesel (1840), a late watercolour painted at a turning point in the painter's career, and also estimated to fetch 3 million pounds, and Venice: Looking Towards the Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore With a Storm Approaching (1840).
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775 to a wigmaker and barber. He had exhibited his first watercolor when he was just 15 and entered the Royal Academy of Art when he was 17. Among his best known creations are paintings on battles and seas.
