Next January 28, Christie’s will auction an extraordinary group of watercolors by the great 19th century British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner. The five watercolors, including four landscapes and one rare study of a woman’s face, will be among the highlights of Christie’s Important Old Master Paintings auction on January 28, 2009. The group comes from the estate of well-known art collectors and philanthropists William and Eleanor Wood Prince of Chicago, IL. The couple previously owned Turner’s masterpiece view of Venice, Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, sold at Christie’s in 2006 for $35.8 million, the highest price ever achieved for an old master painting at auction in New York

The leading highlight of the group, "The Brunig Pass from Meiringen, Switzerland" (estimate: $1,500,000 – 2,500,000; pictured - page 1), is recognized by experts as one of the most evocative of Turner’s late, fully-finished Swiss watercolors. Executed in 1847-8, it depicts an Alpine valley as a great bowl of shifting light and shadow, captured in the moment the morning sun climbs above the mountain walls that surround it. A pale crescent moon lingers in the sky, and in the left foreground, the inhabitants of a small village busily set about their day, going to work in the fields, nursing children, or setting off on horseback. This vivid representation of the Alps’ sweeping grandeur – believed to have been originally commissioned or chosen by Ruskin – has been in the Wood Prince private collection for more than 50 years

And next January 29, Sotheby's will auction a magnificent work by Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius", one of the most important oil paintings by the artist remaining in private hands (est. $12/16 million). The work has been in the private collection of prominent fine art dealer Richard L. Feigen for over twenty-five years, and was a highlight of the retrospective of the work of JMW Turner RA presented in 2008 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Dallas Museum of Art. The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius is one of only three oil landscapes concerned with ancient Greece painted by Turner, and is one of less than twenty significant paintings by the artist still held in private hands