Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Description

Few English garden scenes have been written about as often as this one, and visitors still slow their pace when they reach it in the Tate. Generations of critics have reached for the word Impressionist to describe what happens on this canvas, though the carnation lily lily rose reproduction shown here reveals a working method closer to patient observation than quick notation. The painting rewards the kind of looking that takes time, which is exactly what it asked of the artist who made it.

About Carnation Lily Lily Rose Reproduction

Two girls in white dresses, Dolly and Polly Barnard, bend to light paper lanterns strung among pink roses, carnation sprays, and tall white lilies, their fair hair catching the last warmth of a fading English summer evening. There is no horizon, no sky, no ground plane to orient the eye; foliage and blossom fill the canvas edge to edge, so the lanterns read as small suns suspended in a field of green and white. Sargent painted only during the few minutes each evening when the light matched what he had in mind, returning night after night across two summers and, by some accounts, moving real lilies in the garden to keep the composition true to what he saw.

That discipline shows in the brushwork, which breaks the dusk into short, feathery strokes of violet, rose, and acid green rather than smooth gradations of tone. The palette shifts from the cool blue grey of departing daylight to the warm orange glow thrown upward from the lanterns, a transition handled almost entirely through colour rather than line. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887 and bought for the nation through the Chantrey Bequest soon after, the canvas sits at the point where Sargent, trained in the dense realism of his portrait commissions, let a more broken, light-led technique take over for a single ambitious subject.

The hand-painted reproduction

ByMuseum offers this as a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, built up layer by layer on artist-grade canvas by a trained painter working from the original palette and brushwork rather than from a flat scan. Every reproduction is a handmade oil painting, so the ridges of paint that carry the lantern light and the softer, dragged strokes in the foliage are physically present on the surface, not printed onto it. Hung in a room with changing daylight, the canvas continues to shift the way the original does, the lanterns seeming to brighten as the room around them dims.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a printed reproduction
• Available in multiple sizes, including dimensions scaled from the original 174 x 153.7 cm format
• Gallery-ready presentation, finished and ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days