Turner and Scarborough

The best private collection of JMW Turner watercolours on the market for a generation sold for £10.76 million at Sotheby's last night. The owner, a retired Belgian industrialist who was selling them reluctantly, stayed away from the sale because he said it would be "too emotional, too painful".

There were 14 paintings, which spanned 50 years of the artist's career, ending in late impressionistic views of Switzerland, Germany, France and Italy, up for sale last night. However, two remained unsold, including the top lot, Oberwesel, a craggy mountain scene that had a pre-sale estimate of £2-£3 million.

Though the majority of the Turners, which had a total pre-sale estimate of £10-15 million, were Continental views, the collection also included two British seascapes, Scarborough, painted in 1818, and the undated Fishing Boats off Hastings.

The collection had been put together by Baron Guy Ullens, 72, over a decade. "I invest in dreams, and I am involved in all kinds of projects,'' he told The Daily Telegraph before the sale.

He and his wife, Myriam, are involved in humanitarian work, notably in Nepal, where they have set up an orphanage called "Happy House'' in Kathmandu. But his biggest new commitment has been the building of a contemporary art museum in Beijing.

When his bank refused to accept his collection as collateral, he went to Sotheby's, which offered him a financial guarantee if he were to sell his Turners. "I have an obligation to China and its artists. I must not fail them,'' he said.

Turner was born on the 23 April 1775, in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in London, the son of a barber. From these working class beginnings he achieved great wealth, though in old age he lived in some squalor. He cultivated anonymity and tried his best to cloak his personal life in mystery. His first job was as an assistant to an architect. At the age of fourteen he decided to become an artist, and began to study at the schools of the Royal Academy. His early work consisted of drawings and watercolors on paper; it was some years before he felt ready to start painting in oils. He exhibited his first oil painting at the Royal Academy, Fishermen at Sea, in 1796, when he was twenty-one. Success came relatively early, and in 1803, at the age of twenty-seven, he began work on the spacious gallery in his house in Harley Street, which not only advertised his achievements but provided a more sympathetic setting for some pictures than the crowded walls of the Great Exhibition Room at the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, he continued to exhibit at the RA and, unlike a number of other British artists, he remained involved with the Academy throughout his career.

Turner first saw the sea in his early teens, when he was sent to Margate to stay with relatives of his mother. In his later years he again became a regular visitor to Margate, staying in a house overlooking the beach. His landlady, Mrs Booth, became his mistress, and bore him two children. Turner's health began to fail in 1845, when he was seventy, although he lived until the age of seventy-six, and died and his home in Chelsea.

Unlike fellow landscape painter John Constable, Turner traveled frequently and far a field in search of material. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had established a pattern of working and traveling that was to continue throughout most of his working life: touring, sketching and collecting information in the summer, and then returning home to work up finished pictures during the winter.

His earliest tours were within Britain; during the 1790s he visited the north of England, as well as Wales and Scotland. These gave him an appetite for mountains, waterfalls and the grander forms of nature.