"Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the artist John Singer Sargent, an American painter, though he was born in Florence, Italy. It examines how he is noted for his portraits and landscapes and how his first big success in London was his painting "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (1885-6), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887 (and currently at the Tate Gallery). It looks at how the work is 68.5 inches high and 60.5 inches wide and just escapes being a square and how the slight vertical height advantage emphasizes the upright figures of two young girls and the plants in the yard around them. It evaluates how the work presents a near-fantasy subject in a realistic manner, so realistic it seems photographic in its immediacy. The work is considered a triumph in terms of the artist's use of light and it is this latter element in particular that contributes to its realistic look and yet oddly fantasy quality at the same time.

From the Paper:

"As noted, the work is seen as a mixture of Aestheticism and Impressionism. Aestheticism was the term applied to various exaggerations of the doctrine that art is self-sufficient and need serve no ulterior purpose, whether moral, political, or religious. The idea has been expressed in the phrase "art for art's sake." The idea was lampooned by Thomas De Quincey and by Gilbert and Sullivan, but in the 1870s and 1880s, the hyper-sensibility cultivated by certain followers of the Pre-Raphaelites was approved by critic Walter Pater, who in the conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) advocated a sensibility which finds the most precious moments of life in the pursuit of sensations raised to a pitch of "poetic passion" and in the love of "art for art's sake." Ruskin, however, though taken with an enthusiastic worship of beauty, came down against an art which was out of touch with common life. The american artist James McNeill Whistler was an advocate of Aestheticism and sought the emancipation of fine art from moral standards and thus from the common man. A more moderate version of the approach held that aesthetic standards are autonomous, and that the creation and appreciation of beautiful art are "self-rewarding" activities (Chilvers, Osborne, and Farr)."

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