A father ordered an enlarged portrait of his dead daughter, painted from a small picture. He testified that if the portrait “was not perfectly satisfactory to me in every particular, I need not take it or pay for it.” He refused the finished work and would not look at a revised version until the trial. The artist sued.
In 1878 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled for the father in Gibson v. Cranage. “It may be that the picture was an excellent one and that the defendant ought to have been satisfied with it …,” the court wrote. “Artists or third parties might consider a portrait an excellent one, and yet it prove very unsatisfactory …” Under the agreement the father “was the only person who had the right to decide this question.”
Courts keep this personal test for matters of taste, such as a portrait. Where a satisfaction clause concerns “commercial quality, operative fitness, or mechanical utility,” they generally presume that the parties meant what a reasonable person would accept.