BALANCING JAPANESE LANTERNS AND THE LIGHT OF THE SETTING SUN.

BALANCING JAPANESE LANTERNS AND THE LIGHT OF THE SETTING SUN. The camera photographing the light in New York City shows how rapidly it changes. John Singer Sargent set out to portray the light at twilight in his painting “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”. This essay at the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery
(http://jssgallery.org/) by Natasha Wallace describes the challenge. Sargent not only set himself the challenge of portraying two minutes of light. He complicated the problem by throwing in the light from Japanese lanterns. As Natasha Wallace says: “The idea (a purely fanciful one to be sure) was to capture, not the most perfect sunset, but the affect of the most perfect sunset has, in terms of color, shadows and light on a scene. But it was more than that. How about the artificial light of Chinese lanterns at the precise moment of twilight when lanterns and sun are at perfect equilibrium!”