The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842

In 1842 King Ludwig I of Bavaria opened the Walhalla, a vast marble temple above the Danube near Regensburg, built as a hall of fame for great Germans. Turner had watched it going up two years earlier on his way home from Venice, and he imagined its opening day as this shimmering panorama, meant as a tribute to a Europe at peace. Almost nothing in it is sharp. The building and the crowds dissolve into golden haze, which is exactly the Turner people either loved or found baffling. When he sent the picture to be shown in Munich in 1845, the Germans took the hazy handling as an insult to their monument. He painted it on a mahogany panel rather than canvas.