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Lot Essay
Study for ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' is an important oil study that John Singer Sargent made for one of his most famous and renowned works, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-1886, Tate, London). A bucolic vision of childhood innocence and a paean to the beauty of rural England, this iconic painting features two young girls lighting paper lanterns at dusk, standing amid a garden filled with an abundance of tumbling pink roses, beds of maroon and cream carnations and a mass of arum lilies, their luminous white trumpet-like petals framing the children below. The present work is focused on the right-hand figure, Polly Barnard, who posed together with her younger sister, Dorothy (Dolly), in the Cotswold village of Broadway in Worcestershire, over the course of two summers in 1885 and 1886, while Sargent completed his now famed plein air masterpiece.
Here, the young girl appears in a similar pose to the finished work, immersed in the delicate task of lighting the lantern. The glow of the candle illuminates the upper part of her face, allowing Sargent to capture the soft radiance of her complexion. Floral forms dance amid the deep green background, the incandescent colour instilling the same sense of twilit, dreamlike magic that defines the finished work. Included in the memorial exhibition held for Sargent at The Royal Academy in 1926, this work has remained in the collection of Carol and Terry Wall for almost thirty years.
The idea for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose came to Sargent during the summer of 1885. Sargent had up until recently been living and working in Paris, where he had become a popular figure in both artistic and aristocratic circles, receiving commissions from many leading figures of the upper echelons of French society. When at the Salon of 1884 he exhibited Madame X (1883-1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) however, Sargent’s reputation swiftly changed. His daring presentation of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau was ridiculed, and he was mired by negative criticism.
Plagued by self-doubt, Sargent left Paris for England in 1884, where, with the encouragement of Henry James, he began to cultivate a market for himself. He had been commissioned to paint the daughters of Mr and Mrs Thomas Vickers, a wealthy industrialist, in Sheffield, and later in the summer travelled to Petworth in Sussex where he painted more members of the family, including two of the children in the garden, flanked by lilies (Garden Study of the Vickers Children, Flint Institute of Arts).
The following summer, Sargent was on a boating tour with his new friend, the American illustrator, Edwin Austin Abbey. After a swimming accident in which Sargent cut his head badly, the pair made their way to the rural village of Broadway to the home of Abbey’s friends, the American artist, Frank Millet, and his wife, Lily, initially so that Sargent could recuperate. It was in this charming Cotswold village that a circle of likeminded artists and writers had gathered or were frequent visitors, including Frederick Barnard, Alfred Parsons, Edwin Blashfield and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and writers Henry James and Edmund Gosse.
As Sargent and Abbey passed along the Thames at Pangbourne, in Berkshire, the artist had seen a garden at dusk, filled with lilies and Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees. When he arrived at the Millets’ home, Farnham House, he set out to recreate this scene. Initially, he posed their daughter, five-year-old Kate. However, not long after he had begun his work on this painting, the English artist Barnard arrived in Broadway with his wife and two fair-haired daughters, Dolly, aged eleven, and Polly, aged seven. With the exact colouring that Sargent wanted, the sisters became his models, taking the place of Kate, and wearing white dresses made by Lucia Millet, Lily’s sister. Sargent wrote to his friend, Edward Russell in September, ‘Just now I am in a country village with Abbey and Millet who have cottages here. I am trying to paint a charming thing I saw the other evening. Two little girls in a garden at dusk lighting paper lanterns hung among the flowers from rose-tree to rose-tree’ (C.M. Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography, London, 1957, pp. 87-88).
The idyllic village of Broadway provided the perfect setting for Sargent. He extended his stay from weeks to months. With a rambling garden surrounded by endless fields and meadows, it was a quintessentially English country idyll, which, together with likeminded company, provided Sargent the perfect recourse for his work. The summer spent in Broadway was, as Stanley Olson has described, ‘a short, stimulating burst of communal life, a triumph over the downtrodden feelings brewing within him’ (S. Olson, W. Adelson and R. Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist Years, New York, 1986, p. 19).
From this point onwards, Sargent worked intensively on his new composition. He sketched the girls frequently first in pencil and subsequently in oil as he devised the overall format, the setting, and variations of their poses and positioning. Of the individual oil studies of the children, there is one of Dolly (Private collection) and two of Polly (the present work and one other in a private collection), all of which relate closely to the final work.
Devoted to capturing the exact moment that dusk descended, Sargent painted outside, directly in front of his motif. As a result, he could only work for a short amount of time each evening, sometimes just minutes before the twilight turned to darkness. The writer, Edmund Gosse described the process each day: ‘Everything used to be placed in readiness, the easel, the canvas, the flowers, the demure little girls in their white dresses, before we began our daily afternoon lawn tennis, in which Sargent took his share. But at that exact moment, which of course came a minute or two earlier each evening, the game was stopped, and the painter was accompanied to the scene of his labours. Instantly, he took up his place at a distance from the canvas, and at a certain notation of the light ran forward over the lawn with the action of a wagtail, planting at the same time rapid dabs of paint on the picture, and then return again… All this occupied but two or three minutes, the light rapidly declining…’ (quoted in ibid., p. 67). It is Sargent’s faithful dedication and mastery at capturing both the violet-hued twilight together with the luminous artificial light of the lanterns that lends the painting its ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere. Like orbs, the lanterns gleam amid the dancing tapestry of blooms, all drifting amid an enchanting dusk.
As a consequence of his desire to work outside, from life, progress on Sargent’s painting was slow. In addition, as summer gave way to autumn and the garden faded and died back, Sargent had to use artificial flowers, as well as potted lilies to try and achieve the same effect. Sargent wrote of his frustrations at the inevitable changing of the season to his friend, the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose has brought me to bed of a picture…I saw a most paradisiac sight at the end of September [sic] instead of in June as I should have done… Now my garden is a morass, my rose trees black weeds with flowers tied on from a friend’s hat and ulsters protruding from under my children’s white pinafores. I wish I could do it! With the right lighting and the right season it is a most extraordinary sight and makes one rave with pleasure, and the theme in the abstract is charming’ (quoted in E. Kilmurray and R. Ormond, eds., John Singer Sargent, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 114).
Working en plein air was a technique that Sargent had been exposed to in his exchanges with Claude Monet and the Impressionist circle in Paris. His move to England in 1884 precipitated a renewed interest in the depiction of the landscape, and his painting from these contented days in Broadway demonstrates the way in which he had imbibed the Impressionists’ handling, as he captured scenes with a bold palette and swift brushstrokes so that they appeared as if spontaneously encountered vistas. Edmund Gosse affirmed this Impressionist approach, writing of Sargent’s process the time, ‘His object was to acquire the habit of reproducing precisely whatever met his vision without the slightest previous “arrangement” of detail, the painter’s business being, not to pick and choose, but to render the effect before him’ (quoted in op. cit., 1986, p. 17). Yet, as the present work and the final painting show, Sargent never went as far as the Impressionists, as his predilection for compositional structure and clearly defined forms remained at the heart of his painting. In this way, Sargent married elements of Impressionist handling with more established traditions, enabling him in this case to capture a fleeting moment of time filled with rich pictorial detail and a deeply poetic atmosphere.
Sargent ceased work on his canvas in early November and returned to London. As spring arrived, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was still at the forefront of his mind. He sent Lily Millet lily bulbs for her to plant in readiness for his return to the Cotswold village in the summer. By this time, the Millets had moved down the road from Farnham House to Russell House, which was larger and had a more extensive garden, including an orchard, grass tennis court and a swimming hole. New flower beds were planted with roses, swathes of poppies and banks of hollyhocks, and Sargent even transported a number of rose bushes from a nearby nursery to the Millets’ own home to heighten the all-encompassing effect he needed for this composition.
Completed in October 1886, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was first exhibited in The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1887, where it was met with widespread appreciation and approval. ‘London was enchanted by this poetic vision of two little girls lighting lanterns at twilight; the two children in pinafores transformed into Botticellian angels lighting the shrine of an invisible Madonna, whose presence seemed implied by the roses and lilies and the fading summer afternoon’ (C.M. Mount, op. cit., 1957, p. 102). Today, this canvas resides in Tate Britain, London and remains one of the most treasured works by the artist in a public institution. Sargent probably gave the present study to Lily Millet, in whose collection it remained for many years.
Here, the young girl appears in a similar pose to the finished work, immersed in the delicate task of lighting the lantern. The glow of the candle illuminates the upper part of her face, allowing Sargent to capture the soft radiance of her complexion. Floral forms dance amid the deep green background, the incandescent colour instilling the same sense of twilit, dreamlike magic that defines the finished work. Included in the memorial exhibition held for Sargent at The Royal Academy in 1926, this work has remained in the collection of Carol and Terry Wall for almost thirty years.
The idea for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose came to Sargent during the summer of 1885. Sargent had up until recently been living and working in Paris, where he had become a popular figure in both artistic and aristocratic circles, receiving commissions from many leading figures of the upper echelons of French society. When at the Salon of 1884 he exhibited Madame X (1883-1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) however, Sargent’s reputation swiftly changed. His daring presentation of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau was ridiculed, and he was mired by negative criticism.
Plagued by self-doubt, Sargent left Paris for England in 1884, where, with the encouragement of Henry James, he began to cultivate a market for himself. He had been commissioned to paint the daughters of Mr and Mrs Thomas Vickers, a wealthy industrialist, in Sheffield, and later in the summer travelled to Petworth in Sussex where he painted more members of the family, including two of the children in the garden, flanked by lilies (Garden Study of the Vickers Children, Flint Institute of Arts).
The following summer, Sargent was on a boating tour with his new friend, the American illustrator, Edwin Austin Abbey. After a swimming accident in which Sargent cut his head badly, the pair made their way to the rural village of Broadway to the home of Abbey’s friends, the American artist, Frank Millet, and his wife, Lily, initially so that Sargent could recuperate. It was in this charming Cotswold village that a circle of likeminded artists and writers had gathered or were frequent visitors, including Frederick Barnard, Alfred Parsons, Edwin Blashfield and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and writers Henry James and Edmund Gosse.
As Sargent and Abbey passed along the Thames at Pangbourne, in Berkshire, the artist had seen a garden at dusk, filled with lilies and Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees. When he arrived at the Millets’ home, Farnham House, he set out to recreate this scene. Initially, he posed their daughter, five-year-old Kate. However, not long after he had begun his work on this painting, the English artist Barnard arrived in Broadway with his wife and two fair-haired daughters, Dolly, aged eleven, and Polly, aged seven. With the exact colouring that Sargent wanted, the sisters became his models, taking the place of Kate, and wearing white dresses made by Lucia Millet, Lily’s sister. Sargent wrote to his friend, Edward Russell in September, ‘Just now I am in a country village with Abbey and Millet who have cottages here. I am trying to paint a charming thing I saw the other evening. Two little girls in a garden at dusk lighting paper lanterns hung among the flowers from rose-tree to rose-tree’ (C.M. Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography, London, 1957, pp. 87-88).
The idyllic village of Broadway provided the perfect setting for Sargent. He extended his stay from weeks to months. With a rambling garden surrounded by endless fields and meadows, it was a quintessentially English country idyll, which, together with likeminded company, provided Sargent the perfect recourse for his work. The summer spent in Broadway was, as Stanley Olson has described, ‘a short, stimulating burst of communal life, a triumph over the downtrodden feelings brewing within him’ (S. Olson, W. Adelson and R. Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist Years, New York, 1986, p. 19).
From this point onwards, Sargent worked intensively on his new composition. He sketched the girls frequently first in pencil and subsequently in oil as he devised the overall format, the setting, and variations of their poses and positioning. Of the individual oil studies of the children, there is one of Dolly (Private collection) and two of Polly (the present work and one other in a private collection), all of which relate closely to the final work.
Devoted to capturing the exact moment that dusk descended, Sargent painted outside, directly in front of his motif. As a result, he could only work for a short amount of time each evening, sometimes just minutes before the twilight turned to darkness. The writer, Edmund Gosse described the process each day: ‘Everything used to be placed in readiness, the easel, the canvas, the flowers, the demure little girls in their white dresses, before we began our daily afternoon lawn tennis, in which Sargent took his share. But at that exact moment, which of course came a minute or two earlier each evening, the game was stopped, and the painter was accompanied to the scene of his labours. Instantly, he took up his place at a distance from the canvas, and at a certain notation of the light ran forward over the lawn with the action of a wagtail, planting at the same time rapid dabs of paint on the picture, and then return again… All this occupied but two or three minutes, the light rapidly declining…’ (quoted in ibid., p. 67). It is Sargent’s faithful dedication and mastery at capturing both the violet-hued twilight together with the luminous artificial light of the lanterns that lends the painting its ethereal, dreamlike atmosphere. Like orbs, the lanterns gleam amid the dancing tapestry of blooms, all drifting amid an enchanting dusk.
As a consequence of his desire to work outside, from life, progress on Sargent’s painting was slow. In addition, as summer gave way to autumn and the garden faded and died back, Sargent had to use artificial flowers, as well as potted lilies to try and achieve the same effect. Sargent wrote of his frustrations at the inevitable changing of the season to his friend, the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose has brought me to bed of a picture…I saw a most paradisiac sight at the end of September [sic] instead of in June as I should have done… Now my garden is a morass, my rose trees black weeds with flowers tied on from a friend’s hat and ulsters protruding from under my children’s white pinafores. I wish I could do it! With the right lighting and the right season it is a most extraordinary sight and makes one rave with pleasure, and the theme in the abstract is charming’ (quoted in E. Kilmurray and R. Ormond, eds., John Singer Sargent, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 114).
Working en plein air was a technique that Sargent had been exposed to in his exchanges with Claude Monet and the Impressionist circle in Paris. His move to England in 1884 precipitated a renewed interest in the depiction of the landscape, and his painting from these contented days in Broadway demonstrates the way in which he had imbibed the Impressionists’ handling, as he captured scenes with a bold palette and swift brushstrokes so that they appeared as if spontaneously encountered vistas. Edmund Gosse affirmed this Impressionist approach, writing of Sargent’s process the time, ‘His object was to acquire the habit of reproducing precisely whatever met his vision without the slightest previous “arrangement” of detail, the painter’s business being, not to pick and choose, but to render the effect before him’ (quoted in op. cit., 1986, p. 17). Yet, as the present work and the final painting show, Sargent never went as far as the Impressionists, as his predilection for compositional structure and clearly defined forms remained at the heart of his painting. In this way, Sargent married elements of Impressionist handling with more established traditions, enabling him in this case to capture a fleeting moment of time filled with rich pictorial detail and a deeply poetic atmosphere.
Sargent ceased work on his canvas in early November and returned to London. As spring arrived, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was still at the forefront of his mind. He sent Lily Millet lily bulbs for her to plant in readiness for his return to the Cotswold village in the summer. By this time, the Millets had moved down the road from Farnham House to Russell House, which was larger and had a more extensive garden, including an orchard, grass tennis court and a swimming hole. New flower beds were planted with roses, swathes of poppies and banks of hollyhocks, and Sargent even transported a number of rose bushes from a nearby nursery to the Millets’ own home to heighten the all-encompassing effect he needed for this composition.
Completed in October 1886, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was first exhibited in The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1887, where it was met with widespread appreciation and approval. ‘London was enchanted by this poetic vision of two little girls lighting lanterns at twilight; the two children in pinafores transformed into Botticellian angels lighting the shrine of an invisible Madonna, whose presence seemed implied by the roses and lilies and the fading summer afternoon’ (C.M. Mount, op. cit., 1957, p. 102). Today, this canvas resides in Tate Britain, London and remains one of the most treasured works by the artist in a public institution. Sargent probably gave the present study to Lily Millet, in whose collection it remained for many years.