Sotheby's described the sale as one of the finest collections of watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) to have come to the market in living memory, somehow suggesting that the works had been squired away in a baron's castle for at least a lifetime. In actuality the works weren't entirely fresh to the market. Baron Ullens spent the last two decades pulling the collection together, buying some of them at auction as recently as five years ago. On Wednesday, the fourteen works sold for 10.76 million pounds  ($21.74 million) altogether, short of its low estimate sans buyer's commission and just over half the record $35.8 million Steve Wynn spent to acquire a Turner oil painting of Venice last year.

The highest price paid for a watercolor on Wednesday was 3.6 million pounds ($7.26 million) for Turner's A Swiss Lake, Lungernzee, not quite approaching the 5.8 million pounds ($11.4 million), a record for any watercolor, paid for Turner's The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise (below), at Christie's last June. Earlier this year, Tate Britain launched a public appeal that successfully saved The Blue Rigi for the country, after the government temporarily refused an export permit to Christie's foreign buyer, giving the nation until March 20 to come up with a reduced purchase price of 4.95 million pounds. Over 11,000 people donated 550,000 pounds—some "buying a brushstroke" (make that a pixel) online for 5 pounds each—to keep the watercolor in a public British collection.

Britain's most expensive artist until Francis Bacon's Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in May, Turner left the contents of his studio, 19,000 watercolors, drawings and oils, to Britain upon his death in 1851, including risqué images that The New York Times assures us were not destroyed in a bonfire in 1858.

Tate Britain will loan 86 works that were part of the Turner bequest to the National Gallery of Art in Washington this fall (October 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008) for what the museum is calling the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the United States, ostensibly outshining the retrospective accorded to the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The U.S. Turner exhibition was postponed two years ago because of the enormity of the $1 billion-plus cost to insure it.

The retrospective, which will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, promises to offer a new look at the eccentric pioneer of Romanticism and major influence on impressionism and modern art. A lifelong bachelor who fathered two daughters, scribed long poetic titles for his compositions, and bolstered paint with spit and snuff, Turner claimed that he had himself tied to the mast of a ship for four hours in a howling storm in order to experience the drama of the sea. Perhaps fittingly, Britain's most controversial tribute to the painter of light is the Turner Prize, that great whipping post of contemporary English society.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS