The Painter Who Chased the Light
For a few purple minutes each evening, an American exile knelt in an English garden and raced the dying sun to paint two little girls lighting lanterns. It took him two years to finish.
John Singer Sargent moved to England from Paris shortly after his 1884 painting Portrait of Madame X had scandalized the city, and by the summer of 1885 he was settled at Farnham House in Broadway, in the English Cotswolds, staying with his friend Francis Davis Millet. What he found in that garden village, among friends and fellow artists, would become one of the most beloved paintings of his career.
The idea began on the River Thames at Pangbourne that September, where Sargent went boating with the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey. Drifting among lilies at dusk, he noticed Chinese paper lanterns glowing softly in the trees along the bank. The image lodged in him: lanterns, twilight, flowers, the fleeting purple hush of evening light.
Back at Broadway, he set to work in the garden, using Katherine, the five-year-old daughter of Millet, as his first model. But her dark hair did not suit the vision in his mind, and he replaced her with Dolly and Polly, the daughters of illustrator Frederick Barnard — Dolly eleven, Polly seven — chosen specifically because they were blonde. Dressed in white, the girls stood among pink roses, yellow carnations, and tall white lilies, lighting paper lanterns as day slipped into evening.
Sargent was obsessed with capturing one precise moment of light, so he painted en plein air, outdoors, in the Impressionist manner. Every day from September through November 1885, he worked only in the few minutes when the dusk looked exactly right, racing the sunset with his brush. The result was a canvas steeped in an overall purple tint, the color of evening itself.
But autumn does not wait for artists. As the real flowers in the garden withered, Sargent had them replaced with artificial ones so the scene could hold its shape. Even so, the picture remained unfinished when the light of that year ran out. He returned the following summer to Millet's new home nearby, picking up the work again until he finally completed it by the end of October 1886 — a project that had consumed portions of two full years.
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