Who Was Eugène Carrière, the Master of Shadows?

Eugène Carrière was born in 1849 in Gournay-sur-Marne, just east of Paris. His father was a struggling insurance salesman, but descended from a family of artists – Carrière’s paternal grandfather was a professor of drawing and his uncle Alphonse a portraitist and genre painter. Art was part of his DNA:

The family relocated to Strasbourg and Carrière was enrolled aged 12 to train as a commercial lithographer. He apprenticed with the printer-lithographer Auguste Munch before moving to Saint-Quentin to work. After an artistic infatuation with the Rococo pastel portraits of Quentin La Tour, a brief trip to Paris sealed Carrière’s fate. Seeing the works of Peter Paul Rubens in the Louvre in 1869 “struck me like a thunderbolt,” Carrière recalled. “I vowed I would be a painter at all costs, though I had not bargained for what followed.”

Years of struggle would test his newfound resolve. Carrière moved to Paris, where he was accepted into the studio of the successful academic painter and École des Beaux-Arts professor Alexandre Cabanel. Within a matter of months, however, the Franco-Prussian war turned his life upside down. In 1870 Carrière was taken prisoner and interned at Dresden. Released the following year, he returned to Paris where he resumed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1877, Carrière left Cabanel’s studio, and moved to London with his young bride Sophie Desmouceaux. Despite finding some work designing greetings cards, London was a period of grinding poverty for the young couple. Six months was enough; they relocated back to Paris, where Sophie gave birth to their first child Elise in 1878. Their second, Eugène Léon, was born in 1881 (diphtheria would claim his life in 1885), followed by Marguerite in 1882. Carrière’s daughter Nelly arrived in 1886, followed by Jean-René in 1888 and Lucie in 1889.

The tide in his artistic career began to turn when in 1883 La Jeune mère (The Young Mother) was honoured with a medal and purchased by the French state. Crucially, Carrière was introduced to the leading critic Roger Marx, who would become an advocate of Carrière’s work. Carrière’s unwavering faith was slowly bearing fruit. His circle of supporters grew: in 1888 Carrière met the influential critic Gustave Geffroy, who would introduce him to the writer Edmond de Goncourt and, in 1889, urge Georges Clemenceau, then minister of arts, to award Carrière the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. At the age of 40, Carrière had finally arrived, enjoying success and critical recognition as well as attaining a measure of financial stability.

Though often associated with the Symbolist movement, Carrière eschewed trends prevalent in his time. Perhaps his greatest legacy was his body of work depicting the quiet dignity and grace of family life. His wife Sophie was his preferred model, starting with La Jeune mère (The Young Mother) (1879), which showed his wife breastfeeding their first child Élise. Maternité, the intimate and universal relationship of mother and child, was a particular motif that Carrière revisited time and time again. Carrière’s hand blurred the boundaries of form, merging mother and child in a tender eternal embrace.

Carrière constantly observed each of his beloved children, capturing their multifaceted characters on canvas in intimate portraits and genre scenes of daily life that formed a “sweet and tragic poem of human tenderness.” Carrière did not turn his head from the suffering around him, reasoning that, “life without suffering is no more conceivable than force without resistance.” The sickness and death of his beloved Eugène Léon was movingly rendered in L’Enfant malade (The Sick Child). Presented at the 1885 Salon, it was awarded a medal and purchased by the State.

Originally preferring the sensuous, rich palette of Rubens and Velázquez, Carrière developed a powerful atmospheric style that shrouded his subjects in a misty poetic reverie. Carrière’s challenging time in London had cultivated an artistic and spiritual affinity with J.M.W. Turner, the English Romantic painter who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature," in the words of the English art critic John Ruskin. Reflecting upon that period, Carrière said, “Always alone, I spent my time working and thinking. Turner was with me in spirit.”

Sharing the same penchant for darkness as Rembrandt and Titian, over time Carrière stripped away superfluous fripperies in favour of simple lines and supple forms accentuated by dramatic chiaroscuro. His paintings layered two or three tints of monochromatic earthy tones, creating ethereal presences that materialised on canvas as if sculpted from light and shadow. He wiped and scratched his brushes in the wet paint surface, subtracting until the grain of the canvas was revealed, a method that set the painting’s surface in rhythmic motion.

Carrière was a portraitist of humanity, possessing an extraordinary ability to perceive and capture its essence. In the same era that photography was moving rapidly towards capturing moments on film in shorter lapses of time as well as in full colour, Carrière sought to erase traces of chronological time, rational space and natural light from his paintings. Soft monochromatic sfumato elevated his sitters to timeless expressions of feelings and abstracted movements in space, recordings of time elapsed.

His Self-Portrait (c. 1893), in the collection of the Met, personifies hardship and resilience in the inky dark eyes penetrating the tawny gloom. The painter Paul Gauguin was captured as he turned his head, wisps of words forming on his lips. Rodin was painted several times by Carrière, both in oil paint and lithography, his warmth and intelligence inherent in the voluminous contour lines animating his visage from his forehead to his luxuriant beard. The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who resided in a neighbouring studio in Montparnasse for a time, remarked to him, “Each visage you depict seems to evoke an accumulation of existences,” whilst de Goncourt commented that Carrière was “a ghostly realist, a psychological painter” who did not make a portrait of a face so much as a “portrait of a smile.”

Perhaps the most famous of Carrière’s artistic admirers was Rodin. The friends are thought to have first crossed paths when Carrière worked at the Sèvres porcelain factory between 1880 and 1884. Carrière’s highly modelled works became reference points for Rodin's later marble sculpture, with Rodin preferring to view his sculptures bathed in soft candlelight at night, and even planning for his masterwork The Gates of Hell to be illuminated from below. Asked by Rodin to create the poster for his landmark show at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, Carrière responded with a lithograph of the artist crafting a sculpture from darkness with his bare hands, a ray of light from above illuminating his forehead and brow.

Carrière’s brief but intense friendship with Gauguin also influenced the latter’s work, with Gauguin’s style at the time recalling Carrière’s distinctly soft focus and sublime, emotive quality. Gauguin called his friend “a great artist,” whilst Carrière hosted Gauguin’s farewell banquet before his voyage to Tahiti. The pair exchanged paintings, with Carrière including Portrait of Gauguin in his first solo show in 1891 and Gauguin gifting a self-portrait to Carrière.

Carrière inspired artists of diverse movements, touching artists that would define multiple generations after his time. By 1892 Carrière’s influence had become so pervasive that the art critic and Nabis artist Maurice Denis began referring to a “school of Carrière,” whilst Marx noted in 1895 that “the last Salons have brought to light the increasing influence of Carrière on new generations.” A progressive thinker, Carrière was also motivated by a desire to educate others, opening a “school of the street” in 1900 which propagated his social, moral and artistic philosophies. Henri Matisse, André Derain and other Fauvists came to study at Académie Carrière, where Carrière was not so much concerned about teaching art as he was bent on instilling ideas about the meaning of life, man’s relation to nature and the wonders of the universe upon his students.

Just a generation later, Pablo Picasso’s blue and pink periods were indebted to Carrière. Alberto Giacometti was captivated by Carrière’s works upon arriving in Paris, borrowing his monochromatism and completing his own series of portraits, the “Dark Heads,” three decades later. The celebrated pioneer of British modern sculpture Henry Moore adored Carrière’s works, hanging his collection in his innermost sanctum: the private sitting room at his home in Perry Green, the walls of his wife Irina’s room, and the corridor leading to the room of his beloved only child, Mary.

Amidst many honours, including multiple public commissions and two published monographs on his work, the end came too soon for Carrière. In 1902 he underwent surgery for throat cancer, but continued to work. He moved to Mons in Belgium for further treatment, returning to Paris for the 1905 Salon d’Automne, but further surgery later that year left him paralysed. “Love each other wildly!” he proclaimed to his beloved children with his dying breath. He passed away on 27 March 1906, at the age of 57. His funeral was attended by the great and the good of Parisian society. Rodin, there until the end, delivered a moving eulogy that summed up the abiding legacy of his dearest friend: