Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Who the two girls were

They are sisters: Dorothy Barnard, known as Dolly, aged eleven, on the left, and Marion Alice Barnard, known as Polly, aged seven, on the right. Their father was the illustrator Frederick Barnard.[2]

They were not the first choice. Sargent began the canvas in August 1885 using Katharine Millet, the five-year-old daughter of his host, the American painter Francis Davis Millet. He switched to the Barnard sisters within a few weeks because their hair was the color he wanted.[1][2]

Dorothy Barnard kept the two pencil studies Sargent made of the sisters' heads for the rest of her life and left them to Tate in 1949.[1]

Ten minutes an evening

Sargent painted the picture outdoors, from the thing itself, which he almost never did at this scale. The light he wanted lasted only a few minutes each evening, and a minute or two less with every day that passed. Everything had to be ready before it arrived: easel, canvas, flowers, and the two girls in their dresses.

He told his sister Emily what the difficulty was. The flowers were more brilliant than any paint he had, the lawn behind them was the brightest green, and the effect he was after only lasted ten minutes.[3]

The writer Edmund Gosse was at Broadway that autumn and described the routine in a letter to Sargent's biographer Evan Charteris. The artists played lawn tennis until the moment came, then stopped and walked the painter out to his canvas.

“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 wag-tail, planting at the same time rapid dabs of paint on the picture, and then retiring again, only with equal suddenness to repeat the wag-tail action. All this occupied but two or three minutes, the light rapidly declining.”

Another painter in the group, Edwin Howland Blashfield, said the canvas looked scraped down most mornings, the previous evening's work removed, and that this happened over and over.[1]

The garden could not keep up either. As the roses died, Charteris records, artificial blooms were bought from the London draper Marshall and Snelgrove and wired onto the withered bushes.[4] For the second summer Sargent sent fifty Aurelian lily bulbs ahead to Broadway so that Lucia Millet could grow them in pots and move them where he needed them.[5]

He worked from September to early November 1885 in the garden of Farnham House, where the Millets were renting, and resumed in the summer of 1886 at their new house in the same village, Russell House. He finished in about October 1886.[1]

The canvas, and a story about a pitchfork

The unfinished picture spent the winter of 1885 rolled up in the Millets' barn. Millet family tradition held that Sargent unrolled it in 1886 to find a pitchfork had gone through it, and that he cut about two feet off the left side to lose the damage. The story also claimed the severed strip became another Sargent painting.

Tate examined the canvas and published the results in 2016. The conservator Rebecca Hellen and the Sargent scholar Elaine Kilmurray found a genuine puncture about fifteen millimeters long in the upper right, with an early patch on the back, so something did happen to the rolled canvas.[2]

What did not happen is the cut. No part of the picture was removed from the left and repainted elsewhere. Sargent had started on a much larger working stretcher and reduced it to something near square, and the paint that went missing went from the top and the bottom, where turned-over edges still carry flowers that no longer show.[2]

Where the title comes from

A visitor asked Sargent in the garden what he meant to call the picture. He was humming a song the group had sung the night before, and one line of it answered the question. Evan Charteris printed the anecdote in 1927.[4]

The song is "The Wreath", a pastoral glee for three voices by the composer Joseph Mazzinghi, identified by the Sargent scholar David McKibbin. It opens by asking shepherds whether they have seen Flora pass this way, and it describes the wreath she wore: carnation, lily, lily, rose.[1]

The line is a list of flowers and nothing more. It is not a description of the picture, and the plants in the picture are not arranged to match it.

The Royal Academy, 1887

The painting hung at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1887 as catalogue number 359.[6] The critics split over it. Harry Quilter called it an exquisite work of art in the Spectator; the Daily Telegraph wondered in print whether the whole thing was meant as a practical joke.[3]

Claude Phillips, writing in the Academy, granted the eccentricity and the straining after a new kind of impression, and then said it would be hard to name another painter who could have brought the thing off.[3]

It was bought that year for the nation under the Chantrey Bequest, the fund left by the sculptor Francis Chantrey to buy British art for the public collection. The price was 700 pounds.[6] Tate's own account credits the purchase largely to the insistence of Frederic Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy, who chaired the Chantrey committee.[1] It was one of the first pictures Sargent made after leaving Paris for London, three years after the reception of Madame X had ended his practice in France.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

There are two light sources here and no daylight to speak of: paper lanterns burning from inside, and the last blue of a sky that is not in the picture. Look at what each one does to white.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Reproduction and collection record.