The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays, so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdecken pacing his quarter-deck, cursing the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend, the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then, credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all, the grip! Only Turner--" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque; then followed apocalyptic visions, in which the solid earth staggered through the empyrean after a black sun--a magnetic disk doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished." Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt, faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the whites--ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche hermine"--the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows--what were all these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity" obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of Frédéric Chopin.