you never feel like you've finished looking at it, so you can look at it once
but you really don't feel like you've seen everything. My name's Rebecca Helen
and I'm part of the paintings conservation team here at take Britain
it is one of the most loved pictures in the Tate's collection, people keep asking
where it is. My name is Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, I'm an Assistant Curator at Tate
Britain and I'd look after Sargent's paintings. This painting came off display
which is quite a rare thing. We agreed for it to go to the National Portrait
Gallery, which is obviously only just up the road from Tate Britain. The title
itself 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' has a rhythm that suits the picture very well
Sargent painted it at a time when he was in crisis, so it's a very important
picture for his life, but also for the history of British art. It's the picture
which probably made Impressionism accepted in England. Sargent sees two
little girls lighting lanterns at Pangbourne originally, and it was simply an
image that really inspired him and he took that idea and decided that he
wanted to create a masterpiece. He really had to reproduce this vision
this magical vision that he had. We know that he struggled because he writes
about his struggles in correspondence to friends and family and he calls it an
extremely difficult subject. He painted it over two summer periods in 1885 and
1886. He did paint some of the elements of the composition individually even
though he's all the time conceiving of this kind of snapshot moment. The main
challenge, of course, with painting twilight, when you are committed to
painting 'en plein air', is that you only had between 2 and 20 minutes to actually
capture the light. Painting 'en plein air' was effectively painting in open
nature and it was an ideal for people like Turner but it became a real credo
for somebody like Monet, and of course Sargent was very close to Monet at the
time and he shared this practice with him. The whole community of artists in
Broadway felt that they played a part in this picture because every night at
twilight they all had to stop their activities, they had to stop playing
tennis and they had to help Sargent set up the whole studio, if you want, even
though he was painting outside the way in which he painted was very physical
people commented on the fact that he looked like a fencer, what he was doing
was comparing all the time what he could see and then transcribe it onto the
canvas, which meant that he had this very long brush and his palette in hand and
did this, stepped back, looked at the scene and did this, and he had to work so
quickly, and even quicker than usual obviously
because he only had 10 minutes to paint every day. He was meant to have been a
fantastic pianist, he probably paints like he played the piano in the sense
that he can move with the canvas and move with the paintbrushes and you can see
that in the way that he applies wet and wet paint strokes and develops the image
time was of the essence and that was, I think, the greatest challenge. It really
comes together because Sargent looked at this very specific light so closely
and because he had this direct experience of it and that's why he's
scraped down the canvas every night he had to get it right. Some people at the
time would have considered the painting to be unfinished purely because of
Sargent's very gestural brushwork. So if you look at the hand of Dolly Barnard
it looks absolutely fine and finished from far away but if you look at it from
very close-up, you do wonder what it is. Some of Sargent's contemporaries would
have judged this to be too sketchy. It has a great value to those who are
interested in process. Looking at the painting in such detail has really given
us an opportunity to try and understand how much effort, consideration, as well as
spontaneity, goes into creating what people think of as a very strong piece
of English Impressionism. It triggers all sorts of sensations you can just feel
this painting and I think that's possibly why it's so popular
many 19th century paintings also require some sort of interpretation, you need to
understand the narrative maybe to appreciate the painting, but here it's not
the case. For me it's a visual poem that you can
appreciate immediately
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