Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

This past summer I travelled to England and visited the Tate Britian Museum. It took an hour on the train from Oxford, where I was attending school, to London, then the subway, and a short walk to Millbank Street before I reached the Tate. It was one-thirty when I sat down in the ground floor restaurant and began High Tea. After the raisin scones, clotted cream, strawberry jam and a spot of tea, I left the restaurant for one of the most marvelous collections of art in the western world. Among the exhibitions were the JMW Turner watercolor exhibit, a man credited with re-inventing landscape painting during the 19th century, the Claire Barclay exhibit, entitled Half-Light, which was held from July 3rd to September 12th, 2004, an evocative sculptural display of leather, canvas, metal, and rubber or fur which encourages the viewer to sense her work from an intuitive mindset, and The Art of the Garden exhibit, held from June 3rd to August 30th, 2004, concerning the British artists exploration in garden art over the last two-hundred years.

The Art of the Garden exhibit, held on the ground floor of the Tate, included works by William Nicholson, John Constable, David Inshaw, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Graham Fagen, Marc Quinn, and John Singer Sargent. One particular painting of which I am infatuated with is Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. This garden image is set in the Cotswolds area in a small village called Broadway. The figures are Polly and Dolly Barnard, the daughters of the 19th century illustrator Frederick Barnard. Sargent worked on the painting over a period of twelve weeks, laboriously making preparatory sketches and including the most appropriate flowers from the surrounding cottage gardens, transplanting them for the composition. He decided on a square format for the canvas and worked for a short period of time each evening at dusk to aquire the exact amount of light and occationally scraping it down in the morning in order to repeat the process so he could enjoy learning from it. The birth of the idea was inspired by an evening scene he witnessed in 1884 in Birkshire, while in the garden of the Lavington Rectory as he was staying with the Vickers family. The idea was to capture the effects that a perfect sunset has on color, shadows and light in a scene, and not to capture the light of a perfect sunset. The Rectory scene was of the Vicker's two little girls lighting oriental styled paper lanterns amist a garden setting of rose trees and white lilies. The title of the painting was affectionately adopted from the up-lifting lyrics of an earlier version of a popular song of the period by Joseph Mazzinghi where the question "Have you seen my Flora pass this way?", is answered with "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose". Sargent's theme of the dream of childhood was based on memory as well as observation and was a popular artistic and literary theme of the time where 'play' was a key term, but his incredible task was to perfectly portray the emitting light of the lanterns and the reflecting light of the sunset and lanterns off of the figures and surrounding setting.

Sargent began with a 5 year old model who was the daughter of an American physician Dr. Frank Millet in Broadway, where he was staying from the early autumn month of August 1885 to November of 1886. The young girl had trouble keeping still for the sitting so Sargent selected the two Barnard sisters who were at a more commensurate age. Each evening the Barnards would play a game of lawn tennis of which Sargent would participate in, and when the lighting was right the subjects would take their places and the artist would commense with his painting. After a few minutes the artist, having lost his light, would leave the painting for the ladies to care for and he would resume his game. Sargent would dress the girls in white sweaters which came down to their ankles because of the cool weather. Over this he would pull the white dresses which are shown in the painting. The flowers Sargent had transplanted were dying faster than he could paint them so he had Marshall and Snelgrove Draperies replace them with artificial ones. In November of 1885 the painting was stored in the Millet's barn until the two children returned in November of 1886 to begin the painting again.

Sargent drollfully remarked that his painting had become his "Darnation, Silly, Silly, Pose" after complaining to his novelist friend Robert Louis Stevenson, "my garden is now a morass, my rose trees black weeds with flowers tied on from a friend's hat". The painting, a major popular and critical success, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887. It was instantaneously purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the nation and conveyed persuasively into civic domain.