PICTURE SALES.
A collection of modern English pictures, the property of a gentleman in the North of England, and including works by many of our leading artists, was sold at Messrs. Foster's on Wednesday and Thursday last week.
The highest work in the collection was Turner's "Neapolitan FisherGirls surprised while Bathing by Moonlight," exhibited in 1840; one of the most beautiful pieces of colour which the artist has left. The early moonlight, mingling its soft beams with daylight not yet wholly departed, steeps a great portion of the picture in exquisite hues of azure and silver ; and these are contrasted by the ruddy orange light which glows out of Vesuvius, and by the deeper red of a fire kindled on the beach. The faintly-defined figures, and the uncertain looming of the massed buildings in the background, combine with the effect of light into a wonderful whole. Of similarly high quality as a water-colour is the "Village of Fliihlen on the Lake of Uri." Some other water-colours of Turner's youth were curiously colourless and insipid, suggesting rather the style of some ordinary drawingmaster than anything capable of culminating in such lofty perfection.
Of the remaining oil-pictures, Dyce's finely-designed "King Lear and the Fool in the Storm," exhibited a few years ago, was the most remark " I would have served him,' adds the epitaph-writer, if a king, even in a gaol, could have been an honest man ".; and with this ffing' at the genus and the individual he dismisses the guinea."
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