PICTURE SALES.
A collection of modern English pictures, the property of a gentleman in the North of England, and inchidiug 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
able. Collins's "Haunt of the Sea-fowl," and a "Venus" by Etty, are also known. Three works painted last year had not appeared in any exhibition: a Sunrise by Linnell,-crude in its purples and yellows, and more daring than successful ; the "Babes in the Wood" by Maelise,-a vulgar exaggerated failure ; and a "Spanish Girl returning from the Fountain" by Philip,-quite as pleasing as most of his recent works of the same class, though not carried so far. A sketch by Mr. Poole of his "Seventh Day of the Decameron" has the poetical qualities of the picture in full measure. The water-colour department of the collection abounded in good names, but was not much distinguished by striking specimens, spite of some of William Hunt's wonderful fruit, and a very nice Welsh view by Mr. Thomas Denby. On Saturday last, at Messrs. Christie's, the works by the into Mr. Glass which remained unsold at his melancholy death were disposed of; the "Escape of Mary Queen of Scots," "The Prairie," and "The March across the Desert" of Occur de Lion and the Crusaders, being the principal Iota.
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