The Last Rose of Summer

On August 30th 2019, I started to collect images and sounds for the Last Rose of Summer painting. I wanted to capture visually the rushing waves of chirping crickets out of sight high up in the trees.  On September 22nd 2019, I began to paint the white rose at the center of the painting. Little did I know then that this painting would consume me for many months – until April 21st 2020 when I finished it up in Ellenville during my forest retreat from New York City.

The ballade, The Last Rose of Summer, tells us how the last rose stands there bleakly alone after all her lovely companions have faded and gone. During the months that I listened to the crickets whooshing away the end of summer, and took photographs here in Battery Park City of the butterflies, flowers and dragonflies that I used in the painting, my beloved German Shepherd, Mamba, accompanied me. I never imagined that these last days of summer would become a testament to the end of Mamba’s life. As the white silk petals of the last rose began to curl and the edges turned brown, Mamba was already dying. On February 20th 2020, Mamba was diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer and I was forewarned that she had only a few more days of life. On March 8th, unable to breathe, Mamba died. Five months later, on August 14th 2020, Mamba’s casket of ashes was buried below the Buddha statue, covered by rose petals and feathers and sheltered beneath the umbrella of a weeping river birch.  

The painting spanned almost eight months of work, starting from the central rose and working outwards and upwards to the gardens and hills at the top and finally downwards to the Hudson or ‘Shatemuc’ (indigenous American) river at the bottom of my garden that flows two ways from the Hudson Bay to the Atlantic Ocean.  

The Last Rose of Summer

T’is the last rose of summer,
    Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
    Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
    No rose-bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes
    To give sigh for sigh!

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one.
    To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
    Go, sleep thou with them;
Thus kindly I scatter
    Thy leaves o'er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
    Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow,
    When friendships decay,
And from love's shining circle
    The gems drop away!
When true hearts lie wither'd,
    And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
    This bleak world alone?

Irish ballade by Thomas Moore (1805)

Music:

The Last Rose of Summer for voice and piano in D Major by Sir John Stevenson (1761-1833).

Fantasie on the Irish ballade The Last Rose in E Minor for Piano, Op. 15, by Felix Mendelssohn.