Of Clients and Patrons.—It must, of course, be left to each one to establish his own relations with those who ask work of him; but a few hints may be given.
You will get many requests that will seem to you unreasonable and impossible of carrying out—some no doubt will really be so; but at least consider them. Remember what we said a little way back—not to be set on your own allegory, but to accept your subject from outside and add your poetic thought to it. And also what
in another place we said about keeping all "solvent"—so do with actual suggestion of subject and with the wishes of your client: treat the whole thing as "raw material," and all surrounding questions as factors in one general problem. Here also Ruskin has a pregnant word of advice—as indeed where has he not?—"A great painter's business is to do what the public ask of him, in the way that shall be helpful and instructive to them." [8] You cannot always do what people ask, but you can do it more often than a headstrong man would at first think.
[8] "Aratra Pentelici," p. 253.
I was once doing a series of small square panels, set at intervals in the height of some large, tall windows, and containing Scripture subjects, the intermediate spaces being filled with "grisaille" work. The subjects, of course, had to be approximately on one scale, and several of them became very tough problems on account of this restriction. However, all managed to slip through somehow till we came to "Jacob's Ladder," and there I stood firm, or perhaps I ought rather to say stuck fast. "How is it possible," I said to my client, "that you can have a picture of the 'Fall' in one
panel with Eve's figure taking up almost the whole height of it, and have a similar panel with 'Angels Ascending and Descending' up and down a ladder? There are only two ways of doing it—to put the ladder far off in a landscape, which would reduce it to insignificance, and besides be unsuitable in glass; or to make the angels the size of dolls. Don't you see that it's impossible?" No, he didn't see that it was impossible. What he wanted was "Jacob's Ladder"; the possibility or otherwise was nothing to him. He said (what you'll often hear said, reader, if you do stained-glass), "I don't, of course, know anything about art, and I can't say how this could be done; that is the artist's province."
It was in my younger days, and I'm afraid I must have replied to the effect that it was not a question of art but of common reason, and that the artist's province did not extend to making bricks without straw or making two and two into five; and the work fell through. But had I the same thing to deal with now I should waste no words on it, but run the "ladder" right up out of the panel into the grisaille above; an opportunity for one of those delightful naïve exceptions
of which old art is so full—like, for instance, the west door of St. Maclou at Rouen, where the crowd of falling angels burst out of the tympanum, bang through the lintel, defying architecture as they defied the first great Architect, and continue their fall amongst the columns below. "Angels Descending," by-the-bye, with a vengeance! And if the bad ones, why not the good? I might just as well have done it, and probably it would have been the very thing out of the whole commission which would have prevented the series from being the tame things that such sometimes are. Anyway, remember this—for I have invariably found it true—that the chief difficulty of a work of art is always its chief opportunity. A thing can be looked at in a thousand and one ways, and something dauntingly impossible will often be the very thing that will shake your jogtrot cart out of its rut, make you whip up your horses, and get you right home.
BUT
Observe this—that all these wishes of the client should be most strictly ascertained beforehand; all possibility of midway criticism and alteration prevented. Thresh the thing well out in the preliminary