In Joyce Cary's novel of 1944, The Horse's Mouth, the down-and-out London painter Gulley Jimson seizes the opportunity to paint a huge and wildly imaginative mural, on the twenty-five-by-forty-foot wall of an old chapel that is scheduled for imminent demolition. Rich aristocratic patrons who have acquired his work in the past and a knowledgeable professor who has written about it come to visit while he is at work and ask questions about what the mural “means,” or how exactly it represents its supposed theme of the Creation. Jimson keeps them at bay with jokes – “it means…getting up at seven o'clock every morning…to use all the light available,” and the subject in question is “very likely…a good idea”; but what really engages all of his thoughts and feelings is, as he describes it, simply being in a position to get on with the job: