That phenomenon is _Joseph Mallord William Turner_, the great pyrotechnist, one of the most individual and intellectual landscape painters of all time. What a singular personality! And how vexatious he is to all who merely care about correctness in art! Such persons divide the life of Turner into two halves, one in which he was reasonable and one in which he was a fool. They grant him a certain talent during the first fifteen years of his activity, but from the moment when he is complete master of his instrument, from the moment when the painter begins in glowing enthusiasm to embody his personal ideal, they would banish him from the kingdom of art, and lock him up in a madhouse. When in the forties the Munich Pinakothek was offered a picture by Turner, glowing with colour, people, accustomed to the contours of Cornelius, knew no better than to laugh at it superciliously. It is said that in his last days he sent a landscape to an exhibition. The committee, unable to discover which was the top or which the bottom, hung it upside-down. Later, when Turner came into the exhibition and the mistake was about to be rectified, he said: "No, let it alone; it really looks better as it is." One frequently reads that Turner suffered from a sort of colour-blindness, and as late as 1872 Liebreich wrote an article printed in _Macmillan_, which gave a medical explanation of the alleged morbid affection of the great landscape painter's eyes. Only thus could the German account for his pictures, which are impressionist, although they were painted about the middle of the century. The golden dreams of Turner were held to be eccentricities of vision, since no one was capable of following this painter of momentary impressions in his majesty of sentiment, and the impressiveness and poetry of his method of expression. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ TURNER. JUMIÈGES.] [Illustration: _L'Art._ TURNER. LANDSCAPE WITH THE SUN RISING IN A MIST.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ TURNER. VENICE.]