Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May is an oil painting on canvas by John William Waterhouse, signed and dated 1909 at lower right; it measures 101 by 82.5 cm, has an arched top, and is in a private collection.

It is the second of two paintings Waterhouse took from the opening line of Robert Herrick's seventeenth-century poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, which warns that the flower that smiles today will be dying tomorrow. The first, of 1908, is a half-length figure of a red-haired woman in medieval dress holding a bowl of roses. Here, instead, two young women in blue-violet and pink robes bend to pick flowers in a sunlit meadow beside a stream, while a third figure walks among the pines behind. The Sotheby's catalogue note links the picture to the story of Persephone, who was carried off to the underworld while gathering flowers, and treats it as the first in a series of Persephone-inspired compositions that Waterhouse painted over the following years.

The first owner was Sir Brodie Haldane Henderson of Upp Hall, Hertfordshire, the brother of a British railway magnate. The picture then vanished from view. It is known to have been in Canada by 1959, and in 1973 a couple who bought a farmhouse near Lake Simcoe, Ontario, asked the previous owners to leave it on the wall because they liked it. In late 2001 they showed it to the Toronto dealer Odon Wagner, who told them what it was.

Offered at Christie's in London in 2002, the painting failed to reach the price the owners would accept. In April 2007 it was offered again at Sotheby's in New York, with an estimate of $1.75 to 2.5 million, and again went unsold. It had been shown in public at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in 2005.