(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 th