Clavel, lirio, lirio, rosa

Sargent had just moved to England after a Paris portrait scandal, and he spent the summers of 1885 and 1886 in the Cotswolds among a small colony of artists, trying something completely unlike the society faces he was known for. He had glimpsed children lighting paper lanterns in a garden at dusk and became fixed on catching that exact light. So he painted this outdoors, and only for a few minutes each evening, when the sky had gone violet but the lanterns glowed warm. Every day the two girls in white, daughters of a friend, were posed among the lilies and roses while he raced the fading light. When autumn killed the real flowers he propped up artificial ones and kept going into a second year. The title is a line from a popular song of the day about a wreath of flowers.