Stained Glass Work: A text-book for students and workers in glass

And even a man industrious, alert, and determined may lose his way and get confused amongst the infinity of choice, through being badly taught, and especially through being allowed at first too great a range, too wide a choice, too lavish riches.

A man so trained, so situated, so tempted, stands in danger of being contented to repeat old receipts and formulas over and over, as soon as he has acquired the knowledge of a few.

Or, bewildered with the lavishness of his means and confused in his choice, tends to fall into indecision, and to smear and dilute and weaken.

I cannot help thinking that it is to this want of a system of gradual teaching of the elementary stages of colour in painting that we owe, on the one side, the fashion of calling irresolute and undecided tints "art" colours; and, on the other hand, the garishness of our modern exhibitions compared with galleries of old paintings. For Titian's burning scarlet and crimson and palpitating blue; and Veronese's gold and green and white and rose are certainly not "art colours"; and I think we must feel the justice and truth of Ruskin's words spoken regarding a picture of Linnell's:—

"And what a relief it is for any wholesome human sight, after sickening itself among the blank horror of dirt, ditchwater, and malaria, which the imitators of the French schools have begrimed our various Exhibition walls with, to find once more a bit of blue in the sky and a glow of brown in the coppice, and to see that Hoppers in Kent can enjoy their scarlet and purple—like Empresses and Emperors." (Ruskin, "Royal Academy Notes," 1875.)

From this irresolution and indecision and the dull-colour school begotten of it on the one hand, and from garishness on the other, stained-glass is a great means of salvation; for in practising this art the absolute judgment must, day by day, be exercised between this and that colour, there present before it; and the will is braced by the necessity of constant choice and decision. In short, by many of the modern, academical methods of teaching painting, and especially by the unfortunate arrangement, where it exists, of a pupil passing under a succession of different masters, I fear the colour-sense is perplexed and blunted; while by stained-glass, taught, as all art should be, from master to apprentice, while both make their bread by it, the colour-sense would be gradually and steadily cultivated and would have time to grow.

This at least seems certain: that all painters who have also done stained-glass, or indeed any other decorative work in colour, get stronger and braver in painting from its practice. So worked Titian, Giorgione, Veronese; and so in our days worked Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox-Brown, Morris; and if I were to advise and prate about what is, perhaps, not my proper business, I would say, even to the student of oil-painting, "Begin with burnt-umber, trying it in every degree with white; transparent over opaque and opaque over transparent; trying how near you can get to purple and orange by contrast (and you will get nearer than you think); then add sienna at one end and black at the other to enlarge the range;—and then get a set of glass samples".

I have said that stained-glass is "a great means of salvation," from irresolution and indecision on the one hand and from garishness on the other; but it is only a means—the fact of salvation lies always in one's own hands—for we must, I fear, admit that "garishness" and "irresolution" are not unknown in stained-glass itself, in spite of the resources and safeguardings we have attributed to the material. Speaking, therefore, now to stained-glass painters themselves, we might say that these faults in their own art, as too often practised in our days, arise, strange as it may seem, from ignorance of their own material, that very material the knowledge of which we have just been recommending as a safeguard against these very faults to the students of another art.

And this brings us back to our subject.

For the foregoing discussion of painters' methods has all been written to draw a comparison and emphasise a contrast.

A contrast from which you, student of stained-glass, I hope may learn much.

For as we have tried to describe the methods of the painter in oil or water colours, and so point out his advantages and disadvantages, so we would now draw a picture of the glass-painter at work; if he works as he should do.

For the painter of pictures (we said) has his colour-box of a few pigments, from which all his harmonies must come by mixing them and diluting them in various proportions, dealing with infinity out of a very limited range of materials, and required to supply all the rest by his own skill and memory.

Coming each day to his work with his palette clean and his colours in their tubes;

Beginning, as it were, all over again each time; and perhaps with his heart cold and his memory dull.

But the glass-painter has his specimens of glass round him; some hundreds, perhaps, of all possible tints.

He has, with these, to compose a subject in colour;

There is no getting out of it or shirking it;

He places the bits side by side, with no possibility (which the palette gives) of slurring or diluting or dulling them; he must choose from the clear hard tints;

And he has the whole problem before him;

He removes one and substitutes another;

"This looks better;" "That is a pleasant harmony;" "Ah! but this makes it sing!"

He gets them into groups, and combines them into harmonies, tint with tint, group with group:

If he is wise he has them always by him;

Always ready to arrange in a movable frame against the window;

He cuts little bits of each; he waxes them, or gums them, into groups on sheets of glass;

He tries all his effects in the glass itself; he sketches in glass.

If he is wise he does this side by side with his water-colour sketch, making each help the other, and thinking in glass; even perhaps making his water-colour sketch afterwards from the glass.

Is it not reasonable?

Is it not far more easy, less dangerous?

He has not to rake in his cold and meagre memory to fish out some poor handful of all the possible harmonies;

To repeat himself over and over again.

He has all the colours burning round him; singing to him to use them; sounding all their chords.

Is it not the way? Is it not common sense?

Tints! pure tints! What great things they are.

I remember an old joke of the pleasant Du Maurier, a drawing representing two fashionable ladies discussing the afternoon's occupation. One says: "It's quite too dull to see colours at Madame St. Aldegonde's; suppose we go to the Old Masters' Exhibition!"

Rather too bad! but the ladies were not so altogether frivolous as might at first appear. I am afraid Punch meant that they were triflers who looked upon colour in dress as important, and colour in pictures as a thing which would do for a dull day. But they were not quite so far astray as this! There are other things in pictures besides colour which can be seen with indifferent light. But to match clear tint against clear tint, and put together harmonies, there is no getting away from the problem! It is all sheer, hard exercise; you want all your light for it; there is no slurring or diluting, no "glazing" or "scumbling," and it should form a part of the teaching, and yet it never does so, in our academies and schools of art. A curious matter this is, that a painter's training leaves this great resource of knowledge neglected, leaves the whole thing to memory. Out of all the infinite possible harmonies only getting what rise in the mind at the moment from the unseen. While ladies who want to dress beautifully look at the things themselves, and compare one with another. And how nicely they dress. If only painters painted half as well. If the pictures in our galleries only looked half as harmonious as the crowd of spectators below them! I would have it part of every painter's training to practise some craft, or at least that branch of some craft, which compels the choosing and arranging, in due proportions for harmony, of clear, sharp glowing colours in some definite material, from a full and lavish range of existing samples. It is true that here and there a painter will arise who has by nature that kind of instinct or memory, or whatever it is, that seems to feel harmonies beforehand, note by note, and add them to one another with infallible accuracy; but very few possess this, and for those who lack I am urging this training. For it is a case of

"the little more and how much it is,

And the little less and what worlds away."

Millais hung a daring crimson sash over the creamy-white bed-quilt, in the glow of the subdued night-lamp, in his picture of "Asleep," and we all thought what a fine thing it was. But we have not thought it so fine for the whole art world to burst into the subsequent imitative paroxysm of crashing discords in chalk, lip-salve, and skim-milk, which has lasted almost to this day.

At any rate, I throw out this hint for pupils and students, that if they will get a set of glass samples and try combinations of colour in them, they will have a bracing and guiding influence, the strength of which they little dream of, regarding one of the hardest problems of their art.

This for the student of painting in general: but for the glass-painter it is absolutely essential—the central point, the breath-of-life of his art.

To live in it daily and all day.

To be ever dealing with it thus.

To handle with the hands constantly.

To try this piece, and that piece, the little more and the little less.

This is the be-all and end-all, the beginning and the end of the whole matter, and here therefore follow a few hints with regard to it.

And there is one rule of such dominating importance that all other hints group themselves round it; and yet, strangely enough, I cannot remember seeing it anywhere written down.

Take three tints of glass—a purple, let us say, a crimson, and a green.

Let it be supposed that, for some reason, you desire that this should form a scheme of colour for a window, or part of a window, with, of course, in addition, pure white, and probably some tints more neutral, greenish-whites and olives or greys, for background.