Late Victorian
Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-86, oil on canvas, 1740 x 1537 mm (Tate Britain, London)
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- The fading light of the sun is being
- replaced by the lanterns being held by these children
- it's that moment at twilight when artificial light
- just begins to assert itself against the light of the day
- It is a wonderful and haunting part of the day, and Sargent
- captured it in his painting, Carnation Lily, Lily, Rose
- from 1885-6. You know that title
- was pretty poetic, and the repetition in the title really gives us a
- sense of the idea of repetition of form and light throughout this
- painting. Look at the way the Japanese lanterns move from left to
- right across the middle of this canvas. Forming a
- curving arabesque across the center. They're almost like the notes that you would find
- in a musical score, and we do read across but of course our eye
- also stops because there's so much that's beautiful to look at here.
- All we have is this really lush, rich surface.
- There's nobody that moves paint across the surface of the canvas like Sargent,
- and look how he's just moved that brush across the surface
- in rendering those roses, or the carnations down towards the bottom
- or even the ridges of the lanterns themselves, and the way in which those blue
- shadows play against the beautiful warm illumination from within.
- It's interesting because the parts of a painting that you would expect
- to be illuminated are not. Everything is
- drenched in dusk. You look to the faces of the children
- for where they would be illuminated, where you might see the expression
- on a child's face, but he hasn't concentrated his attention there.
- His attention is dispersed across this decorative surface. The parts that are illuminated are these
- lanterns against this graying, green forms of
- dusk. Look at the way the canvas is really flat; clearly, the influence
- of Japanese prints. The way in which, for instance, the flowers are smallest
- at the feet of the children, and then as we move up to those large lilies
- they rise, and that's directly in opposition to the way
- paintings would normally be constructed. It has the effect of
- making the background come forward. So there is a conflation of
- nature, and childhood, and innocence
- and all of those things coming together, it's just lovely. And so nineteenth century.
- So we have a painting that lacks any kind of a real subject
- except for the quality of light
- and color harmonies, these greens, and peaches, and pinks and whites.
- We see this in British painting the last half of the nineteenth century
- with artists like Albert Moore, where the subject of the painting is the color harmony
- art for art's sake. This is well into this movement that we know as
- aestheticism, which removes all of the literary, all of the weighty
- subjects of history, and really make the painting and the beauty of the painting
- its main focus. And the formal qualities of the painting, like shapes, patterns, colors
- those are the things that become most
- important. We could think about artists also like Whistler.
- And it's easy to see how this becomes important for the beginnings of Abstraction. Looking at
- art not for what it's representing, not for the objects
- it's copying from the world, but for the things that art is made up of itself.
- Sargent actually painted this plein air,
- that is he painted it in a garden. So he was also very interested
- in a tonal accuracy, an accuracy of form, even if in fact
- ultimately the painting is about painting.
- Apparently, this was a bit of a frustration, you know painting outside with models is not an easy thing,
- especially when you've got children, and dusk is such a fleeting moment.
- One can imagine him, in England, in this garden, really trying to keep everybody's
- attention, making sure that the weather is right, making sure that the light is just
- right, and trying to get all of this down.
- The children are really concentrating on the lighting of their lanterns.
- Their thoughtfulness draws us in, and allows us to linger
- over all of the beautiful, visual lushness
- that the artist has given us.
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At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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