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"Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" by Hugh Brewster

Author:

Hugh Brewster

Publisher:

Kids Can Press, 2007

Reviewed by:

John Warren Stewig, Carthage College, Kenosha, Wis.

Books for children about art are often surveys across time periods, for example, ART UP CLOSE. FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN by Claire d’Harcourt (Chronicle 2000). Others are in-depth looks at the life and work of a single artist, as in WHAT MAKES A CASSATT A CASSATT? (MMA/Viking 1994). Still others are arranged by topic: LOOK! BODY LANGUAGE IN ART, by Gillian Wolfe, (Frances Lincoln Books, 2004).

This provides an unusual insight into the life of a single artist, John Singer Sargent, and just one of his paintings. Sargent is best known as the most superlative American painter of portraits of wealthy patrons in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many of these portraits showed off his male patrons’ importance and the beauty of the women.

Yet he also created this charming informal depiction of two young girls, which in the author’s words was “the most talked about painting in London that season (1887).” Taking factual details like the names of the village where the real family and their neighbors lived, the author embroiders a believable fictional account of how the young girl narrator, Kate, might have felt when Sargent, with his “bristling black beard” arrived by boat on the Thames.

Beyond the focus on the “Carnation…” painting, the book includes many other preliminary sketches and finished paintings by Sargent, some vintage photos, and a work by an artist related to the family, Alma Tadema. Brief factual captions accompany the main narrative, to explain the visuals. The full color art on every opening is effectively laid out with wide margins inviting a reader into this effective introduction to Sargent and his life and work.