John Singer Sargent: Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose, Pt. 1

"Lady and Child Asleep in a Punt under the Willows"
John Singer Sargent

"John Singer Sargent's acquaintance with Gloucestershire and the west of England began at Broadway. In 1885 (he had been at the Tite Street studio some six months) he went with the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey for a boating expedition on the Thames from Oxford to Windsor. At Pangbourne Sargent, who was a fine swimmer, dived from the weir and 'stuck a spike with his head,' Abbey wrote, 'cutting a big gash in the top. It has healed wonderfully well, but it was a nasty rap. It was here that he saw the effect of the Chinese lanterns hung among the trees and the beds of lilies... After his head was bound up he knocked it a second time and re=opened the wound.' 

Abbey insisted on Sargent coming to Broadway to recover, and so in September, 1885, Sargent took up his residence at the Lygon Arms, the seventeenth-century inn in that village. He carried with him a sketch of the effect he had noted on the river. It was the origin (so far, at any rate, as the arrangement of light) of the picture 'Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose.'

In those days Broadway had not added to its serpentine length a tail of modern dwellings; the traveller from the vale of Evesham to the Cotswolds was met, at his entrance into the village, by the sight of Russell House, with its tithe barn and old-world aspect.

In 1885 the Millets and Abbey were sharing Farnham House, which lies a few paces higher up the village street. Of this place Sir Edmund Gosse wrote: 'The Millets possessed on their domain a medieval ruin, a small ecclesiastical edifice, which was very roughly repaired so as to make a kind of refuge for us, and there Henry James and I would write, while Abbey and Millet painted on the floor below and Sargent and Parsons tilted their easels just outside.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.) 

weir: 1. A low dam built across a river to raise the level of water upstream or regulate its flow. 2. An enclosure of stakes set in a stream as a trap for fish.