iiur arts.
PICTURE SALES.
This week, Messrs. Foster sold a collection of the British pictures from Mete.hley Abbey, the propertyof Mr. Birch; including the two or three which were reserved at the last sale. A very distinctive and interesting feature in the sale was the set a ten copies by Etty from the Venetian masters—Veronese, Titian, and Tintoret, with one from Rubens. In the most successful of these,—such as Titian's Divine Love, the group of the Merles and Disciples from Tintoret's Crucifixion, or Varoneses Triumph of Venice,—the English painter has caught with extreme vigour and aptitude the manner of his prototypes; and there are only one or two (especially Titian's Venus It la Coquille) which are decided failures. The Ruben, is capital. Among the original works of Etty, the delicious Fleur de lys was supreme. Another very conspicuous picture was the great Opening of Waterloo Bridge, by Constable ; admirably full of air, breeze, flow of water, open play of light, and holiday crowd of barges and lookers-on,—all brought out in a wonderful manner at the proper distance from the most confused blotting, blurring, and dabbing, that can easily be imagined. The Lady Margaret's Page, an old work of Mediae, with some of the least satisfactory among his reoent productions, a pleasant Stothard, Danby's Advent of Spring, oil and water colour pictures by David Cox, and a water-colour by Turner, also appeared in the sale.
Four days have been occupied bv Messrs. Christie and Manson in selling the extensive collection of woiks of art and verte formed by Mr. E. Vernon Utterson, abundant in minor water-colours and in engravings. The drawings comprised, besides numbers of our own school, a halfdozen of Janet's lifelike heads of the old French nobility, and an exquisitely delieate Holbein, Sir Nicholas Poyntz.
Previous page
