THE BERNAL COLLECTIO'N.
The thirty-two days' sale of this large and varied collection—for it is to keep dilettanti and purses on the stretch no less a time—are running their course. The first six days were announced to have realized upwards of 20,0001.; and the enormous sum of 100,0001., or double the valuation proposed to the English Government and said to have been actually offered by the French, has been spoken of as likely to accrue before all is
over.
The pictures, upwards of six hundred, which sold on Saturday last and at the beginning of this week, have commanded solid but not extrava- gant prices; the first day's sale, for instance, producing a total of 30544.. with the maximum single price of 186 guineas. On Tuesday the large* price was 215, given for Janet's portrait of the wife of Francis I. Chosen as the works avowedly were less for their artistic than for their historic and antiquarian value in the illustration of costume, they yet included many great names of painters, as well as many interesting names of sitters. Other principal departments of the collection are the Venetian and Ger- man glass ; the works of medireval art ; the arms and armour, European and Oriental; the watches and clocks, numbering more than a hundred, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the fancy furniture of the eighteenth. The sale of the library, disposed of separately some weeks ago, is said to have yielded 50001. Altogether, the auction will be a memorable one both for extent and success—if it end as it has begun— as proving, among other things, how little the virtuoso appetite, once properly set going, is necessarily affected by the solemn interests of war and the pinching exigencies of war prices.
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