The colour and tone of Turner’s work must therefore be taken as strictly ideal, that is, as a medium of subjective expression, as a mode of spiritual manifestation, and not as an attempt to represent the merely abstract qualities of sense-perception. And what is true of Turner’s colour and tone is also true of his form. I doubt if he ever made a tolerably careful and elaborate drawing of a natural scene from the beginning to the end of his long career--nearly all his elaborate drawings being of architectural subjects. But instead of the prosaic and plodding drawings that other artists make (see, for example, the elaborate pencil studies of trees by Constable in the Victoria and Albert Museum), we find hundreds and hundreds of nervous, eager pencil sketches. When we come to study these ravishing sketches with care we make the astonishing discovery that the bugbear of the drawing school, the prosaic accumulation of particular physical facts known in art academies as “nature,” is simply a hideous abstraction of the theoretical mind. Nature, in this sense of the word, never existed for Turner. The world he saw around him was replete with intelligence, was permeated with spirit; where other artists see only the bare, unrelated physical fact and sensuous surface, his mind is already busy with the inner and invisible significance, and his cunning hand is instantly shaping forth a pictorial embodiment of his own insight and passionate convictions. On the whole, then, this was Turner’s consistent attitude towards nature, though of course, in his earlier years, his sketches were comparatively less swift and eloquent than they afterwards became. And there was indeed a short period during which the merely physical fact was forced into undue prominence. This period culminated in the first visit to Italy in 1819-1820. Here the novelty of the scenery and buildings stimulated the thirst for detailed observation which had been gradually growing on Turner during the previous six or seven years. But in England the very quickness and strength of his intuitions had always prevented the desire for precise observation from gaining the upper hand. In Italy his powers of intuition were useless. He was disoriented. Everything disconcerted and thwarted him. His rapid glance no longer penetrated to the inner essence of the scenes around him. He did not understand the people and their ways, and their relation to their surroundings. For a time he seemed to become less certain than usual of his artistic mission. But he set to work with his usual pluck and energy to assimilate his strange surroundings by tireless observation of the outside. The result was a vast accumulation of disorganized or of only partially organized impressions.