Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). 1885-86. Oil on canvas. 1740 x 1537 mm. Courtesy of the Tate, accession no. N01615. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest, 1887. Downloaded from Art UK> under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND) by Jacqueline Banerjee, who also added the following comments by Richard Ormond.[Click on the image to enlarge it].
Sargent loved staying in Broadway in Worcestershire at this time, and here his passion for flowers, "coupled with his interest in the effects of artificial light" (Ormond 30) led to this popular painting. Another inspiration must have been his pleasure in painting children among flowers (see, for example, his later Helen Sears (1895). Ormond tells us that Sargent had also recently (in 1884) noted "the effect of the Chinese lanterns hung among the trees and the bed of lilies" (30). So here we see
two little girls in party dresses preoccupied in lighting lanterns at twilight against a claustrophobic tapestry of flowers. The picture, painted entirely outdoors, conveys to the spectator the vivid sense of being present at a real event in which light is a palpable essence. It is this which raises the picture above the level of popular storytelling. The English public responded to the poetry of the scene and overlooked the radical impressionist style that had produced it. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was Sargent’s first major success at the Royal Academy and it put his name in the limelight once more. [Ormond 30]
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Bibliography
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Art UK>. Web. 22 January 2024.
Ormond, Richard. "Sargent's Art." John Singer Sargent, edited by Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, ed.. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999. 23-43.
Created 22 January 2024