One of his richest mines of pictorial imagery was Venice; not so much the actual city of the Adriatic, as the fragmentary ideas of an ideal Venice as they floated in the imagination of the ordinary Englishman,--the unconscious crystallisation of the desires of the average middle-class tourist for Southern warmth, freedom, colour, variety, and bodily pleasure. With all the uncanny certainty of genius he gathered up the threads of these incoherent and fugitive desires and fixed them in the forms of immortality. Let us look carefully at the two Venetian sketches here reproduced. In ‘Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone’ (No. 55, N.G.) we see the Campanile and Ducal Palace on the right, a blaze of warm, palpitating light. In the centre there is a stretch of limpid green water, with a tangle of boats on it leading the eye to the opalescent Madonna della Salute in the extreme distance. There is a secondary group of shipping on the left, among whose masts the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore can be seen. No words can describe the intense blaze of light, the brilliance of the colours and their perfect harmony. The execution is breathlessly hurried and seemingly reckless, yet always perfectly under control; the artist’s hand is so audaciously swift because the full value of his colours can only be got in this way. Human skill can go no further in this direction, and no reproduction can do anything like justice to the wonderful original. We find the same qualities in ‘The Approach to Venice: Sunset’ (51, N.G.), and ‘Riva degli Schiavone, from near the Public Gardens’ (56, N.G.). In all these drawings Turner seems to be playing with his material medium, fondling and caressing his colours and the intrinsic beauties of water-colour. Yet it is not mere colour as colour that he gives us, not the cheap and arbitrary and mechanical splendour of merely decorative art. The colour is delicate and subtle, full of surprises, and as varied as nature herself; it is controlled and marshalled by the authority of the tone scheme; it is nature grasped by human intelligence, and made obedient to its organising power. And a large part of the attractiveness of these drawings is due to the ease and grace with which the reign of purpose and intelligence is maintained. After all it is the marvellous technical skill which they display which is the essence of the charm of these works. The subject-matter counts for less than the execution, the objects portrayed are less eloquent than the sense of freedom, mastery and real happiness evident in the artist’s work. He wanted nothing beyond this; the work to him was not a symbol of something higher,--it did not point beyond itself. It was at once means and end, process and fulfilment, work and reward, the toil of life and its consummated bliss. The intrinsic poverty of the subject-matter no doubt serves to [Illustration: _PLATE LXXIX_ APPROACH TO VENICE: SUNSET WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1839] [Illustration: _PLATE LXXX_