NEW YORK— Five watercolors by J.M.W. Turner will be among the highlights in Christie’s Old Master Paintings sale on January 28, 2009. The five works — four landscapes and a rare study of a woman’s face — have been consigned by the estate of William and Eleanor Wood Prince of Chicago. The late couple previously owned Turner’s Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, which 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 five Wood Prince watercolors trace the course of Turner’s evolving style from a 1798 Lake District view painted in collaboration with his contemporary Thomas Girtin (est. $30–50,000), to the majestic The Brunig Pass from Meiringen, Switzerland (1847–48, est. $1.5–2.5 million), which depicts an Alpine valley at the break of day.

Brunig Pass is one of three landscapes in the Wood Prince consignment that were originally owned by John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic who championed Turner in his book Modern Painters.

"With Brunig Pass in particular, there is tremendous excitement to see a masterwork that had been tucked away in the Wood Princes' private apartment in Chicago since 1957, when the Wood Princes acquired it from Agnew's," said Harriet Drummond, head of the Department for British Drawings and Watercolors at Christie's London. "Turner's late Swiss watercolors are from the most highly sought after period of his work."

The Wood Prince consignment also includes important works by Constable, Monet, Corot, Degas, Millet, Munnings, and Chagall.

William and Eleanor Wood Prince, who died in 1998 and 2008, respectively, had a close relationship with Chagall and underwrote his Four Seasons mosaic, unveiled at Chicago's First National Plaza in 1974.