''Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May'' is an

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

on canvas created in 1909 by British

Pre-Raphaelite The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James ...

artist John William Waterhouse. It was the second of two paintings inspired by the 17th century poem "

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a 1648 poem by the English Cavalier poet Robert Herrick. The poem is in the genre of '' carpe diem'', Latin for "seize the day". 1648 text he's to Setting. That Age is best, which is the first, ...

" by Robert Herrick which begins:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.

Lost for nearly a century, this painting was later located in an old Canadian farmhouse. In 1973, a couple was buying the farmhouse and asked its previous owners to keep the painting, which they admired, within the house. Although the new owners knew it was a Waterhouse artwork, they had no idea of its worth or even that it was missing. In 2002, when they took it to an art dealer to be appraised, he "nearly fell off his chair." Nobody knows how the painting ended up in the house, although it is known to have been in Canada since 1959. The artwork was valued at $1.75–2.5 million by

Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...

prior to auction in April 2007, although the painting went unsold.

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''Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may'', 1909
at the Odon Wagner Gallery. 1909 paintings Lost paintings Paintings about death Paintings by John William Waterhouse Paintings based on literature Recovered works of art {{20C-painting-stub

See also

References

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