Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent

Lanterns in the half-light

Two girls in white, one on each side of the canvas, bend over the paper lanterns they are lighting. Tall white lilies stand behind them, pink roses crowd the right-hand side, and carnations and long grass fill the foreground. There is no sky and no horizon; the garden fills the whole picture, and the lanterns glow warm against the cool green and violet of the dusk. The girls are Dolly and Polly Barnard, daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnard. The title comes from the refrain of a popular song of the day, “Ye Shepherds Tell Me”.

A few minutes each evening

Sargent painted it outdoors at Broadway in the Cotswolds, where he spent the summer of 1885, not long after leaving Paris. He wanted the exact light of dusk, so from September into November he worked only for the few minutes each evening when it was right. As the real flowers died with the autumn, he replaced them with artificial ones. He took the picture up again the following summer and finished it in the autumn of 1886. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1887 and bought that year through the Chantrey Bequest, the first of Sargent’s works to enter a public collection.

Where it hangs

The painting is at Tate Britain in London, where it has belonged to the national collection since 1887. It measures 153.7 by 174 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 3,762-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 25 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Tate Britain, London · Wikidata Q1560719 · Wikimedia Commons