Daisy
Glazed shadow box, mixed media
208.5 × 142.4 cm | 82.1 × 56.1 in.
A monumental, dreamlike portrait from Candida Romero’s Little Girls series, Daisy transforms an anonymous Victorian child into a lyrical figure immersed in a field of flowers. Photography, silkscreen, paint, and narrative converge within a glazed shadow-box frame, creating a work that feels at once intimate, theatrical, and deeply layered.
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Daisy comes from Candida Romero’s Little Girls series, a remarkable body of approximately one hundred paintings created between 2003 and 2008. The series originated from a collection of anonymous late Victorian photographs assembled by Pierre-Jean Rémy, the French novelist, diplomat, literary figure, and member of the Académie française. Almost all of the children in these photographs remain unnamed. Their families have been forgotten, their histories dissolved, and what survives are only their faces, gestures, clothing, and expressions, suspended outside biography.
It was precisely this silence surrounding each child that fascinated Rémy and Romero. The original photographs were small nineteenth-century keepsakes, softened by time, with sepia tones, worn edges, and surfaces gently marked by generations of handling. Rather than attempting to recover the factual lives of the girls, Rémy imagined new ones, writing fictional texts that restored a sense of identity, personality, and destiny to children history had left anonymous.
Romero then transformed these photographs and literary fragments into independent pictorial worlds. Her paintings are not illustrations of Rémy’s texts; they are layered acts of reinvention. Across the series, she worked with photography, silkscreen, gesso, acrylic, oil, ink, and, in certain works, antique textiles, lace, paper, and other historical materials. The diversity of materials mirrors the diversity of the imagined narratives themselves, with each painting developing its own atmosphere, surface, and emotional register. The completed series was exhibited in a solo presentation at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris.
Daisy is one of the monumental shadow-box works from the series. Created in 2008, the piece is a glazed shadow box in mixed media, measuring 208.5 × 142.4 cm | 82.1 × 56.1 in. Nearly seven feet tall, it has the scale and presence of a major contemporary artwork while still preserving the intimacy of a remembered photograph.
At the center of the composition, a young girl in a white dress stands surrounded by a field of daisies. The flowers seem to gather at her feet, climb around her figure, and fill the atmosphere around her, creating a world that feels part portrait, part garden, and part dream. In the accompanying text written by Rémy, Daisy is described as being “literally bathed in flowers,” a phrase that beautifully captures the feeling of the work.
What makes Daisy especially powerful is the balance between softness and scale. The blush pink sky, delicate white flowers, and quiet expression of the child give the piece a tender, almost fairytale quality. At the same time, the work’s height, shadow-box construction, and layered mixed-media surface give it extraordinary presence. It is gentle, but not fragile. Romantic, but not decorative. It feels like a world you step into.
I chose Daisy for the Kara Childress Collection because of its emotional beauty and its ability to completely transform a room. I am always drawn to pieces that feel both poetic and strong, and this work has that rare combination. The flowers bring softness, movement, and femininity, while the scale makes the piece feel architectural and important.
In my own design work, I often think about how one piece can set the tone for an entire space. Daisy has that quality. It brings color, romance, history, and imagination into a room without feeling overly formal. The soft pinks, greens, whites, and golden undertones would be beautiful in a layered interior, but the piece also has enough strength to stand on its own as a focal point.
I have admired Candida Romero’s work for years, and Daisy captures so much of what makes her practice special to me. Her work blends history and invention, craft and emotion, timelessness and modernity. This piece feels deeply personal, almost like a memory that has been made visible. It is the kind of artwork that can make a home feel more intimate, more collected, and more meaningful.
For the Kara Childress Collection, Daisy represents everything I love about living with art. It is beautiful from a distance, layered up close, and full of story. It has the presence of an heirloom, the romance of an antique photograph, and the freshness of a contemporary painting. It is a piece to be cherished for generations.