Paintings by Turner and Hals helped Sotheby's last night raise 51.5 million pounds ($102 million) with fees, its second-highest total for an Old Master sale in London.

The 90 lots included a record 13 works that sold for more than 1 million pounds each. Seventy-seven percent of the lots found buyers, with 58 percent of them beating their high estimates, said the auction house.

``People are prepared to pay a lot for the top Old Masters,'' said the London art agent Robert Holden before the sale. ``But demand is sliding away at the lower end. If an auction house goes in with high estimates for secondary stuff, it's asking for trouble.''

This is a handout of the painting "Pope's Villa at Twickenham," by Joseph Mallor William Turner, released to the media on Thursday, July 10, 2008

The previous evening, Christie's International raised 24.1 million pounds from 48 lots with a selling rate of 65 percent.

Several dealers noted that Sotheby's included a higher proportion of the 16th- and 17th-century Flemish and Dutch pictures that are savored by exhibitors at the annual Tefaf art fair in Maastricht, Holland.

Last lot of the sale -- and the most expensive of six works that had been guaranteed minimum prices by Sotheby's -- was J.M.W. Turner's painting of the poet Alexander Pope's house at Twickenham on the river Thames, estimated at 5 million pounds to 7 million pounds.