2–22 August 2025 • Hong Kong

T his summer, we invite you to experience OUT OF THE SHADOWS, the first dedicated exhibition of Eugène Carrière in Asia, outside of Japan. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s mature period, presenting close to 40 works from the pinnacle of his career.

Perhaps the greatest artist you have never heard of, French painter and lithographer Eugène Carrière was a true artist’s artist, a master tremendously respected by his contemporaries and influential to many of the eminent names of early modern art. Auguste Rodin was a lifelong friend, Henri Matisse was one of his many notable students, Alberto Giacometti discovered Carrière’s paintings when he arrived in Paris, and Henry Moore collected Carrière’s works in his home, Paul Gauguin and Edward Steichen held him in high esteem, and Pablo Picasso owes much of his blue and pink periods to Carrière’s influence.

Away from the art trends prevalent in his time, including the Symbolist movement to which he is often linked, Carrière followed his own path, favouring the effects of light over colour. A great master of chiaroscuro, Carrière’s genius was recognised in his talent to express the tenderness of life through the nuances of a monochromatic palette.

In the same era that photography was moving rapidly towards capturing moments on film in shorter lapses of time, Carrière sought a blurred aesthetic in his paintings and lithography, portraying the human form emerging from the depths of shadow, in his own way, recording time elapsed. Remembered as a kind and gentle man, Carrière’s wife, children, and friends were often the subject of his paintings.

Carrière’s conviction that art exists as a way to express life’s joys and sorrows left an indelible mark on artists, critics and writers in the French artistic circle of the time. Roger Marx labelled him a “modern Rembrandt,” while Edmond de Goncourt compared him to a “Velázquez of the twilight.”

Critics often likened his paintings to sculpture; highly modelled in such expert manner on depth that he was called “a painter sculptor” by Rodin. Carrière’s works became reference points for Rodin's later sculptures, an evolution evident in the sculptor’s shift towards a more poetic and spiritual approach to marble, even preferring to view his sculptures bathed in soft candlelight at night. Their lifelong friendship was well-known and highly regarded amongst their circle, a legacy that lasted beyond their deaths. Indeed, to this day, the Musée Rodin in Paris still devotes a large space to Carrière’s paintings.

Carrière passed away prematurely at the age of 57 due to illness. Though overlooked and forgotten in the recesses of art history after the mid-twentieth century, Eugène Carrière’s life and work is finding a new audience. Following a major exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 2006 heralding the centennial of his death, Carrière’s works have been receiving recent institutional recognition in exhibitions including at the National Gallery, London (2017) and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (2025), amongst others.

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Who Was Eugène Carrière, the Master of Shadows?

E ugène Carrière was born in 1849 in Gournay-sur-Marne, France, the eighth child of Elisabeth-Margaret Wetzel and Léon Carrière. Though his father was an insurance salesmen, Carrière hailed from a family of artists – his grandfather was a professor of drawing, his uncle was a portraitist and genre painter. Together with his younger brother Ernest, Carrière began drawing and painting at a very young age. At the age of 12, he began training at the École Municipale de Dessin in Strasbourg for a career as a commercial lithographer.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris in 1868 where Carrière encountered the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens forever changed the course of his fate. Inspired, Carrière moved to Paris and apprenticed at the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, a prominent academic painter at the École des Beaux-Arts (though his studies would be briefly interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871).

In 1878, Carrière married Sophie Desmouceaux, together they would go on to have six children. For Carrière, his wife and children became his preferred models and frequently appeared in his subsequent works.

The years following saw Carrière’s career propel to new heights. By the mid-1890s Carrière’s status in the Parisian art world was so cemented that almost no review would fail to mention him. A pinnacle year in his career, 1897 saw the acquisition of his painting Portraits (or The Carriere Family) by the state for the Musée du Luxembourg, more than 40 works exhibited at the Libre Esthétique in Brussels, and a solo exhibition at the prestigious Salon de L’Art Nouveau in Paris, which then travelled to London.

Known by nearly everyone important in the French artistic circle of his time, Carrière was not only respected by his contemporaries, most notably Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin, but he was a well-regarded educator. At his Académie Carrière, he taught such artists as Henri Matisse and André Derain, as well as many of the Fauvists.

Following years of declining health and two surgeries for throat cancer, Carrière passed away in March 1906 at the age of 57. His works would continue to be exhibited posthumously, while in 1907 a street in both Paris and Strasbourg each were named in his honour.

In 1949, the centennial of his birth was honoured by two exhibitions: at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Notably, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris mounted a major retrospective in 2006 on the centennial of Carrière’s death.

Today, Carrière’s work is held in many significant institutional collections in North America and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, Musée d’Orsay, Musée Rodin, Musée des Arts décoratif, Musée du Louvre and Musée du Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Tate, National Gallery, British Museum, Städel Museum, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire and Russia’s Hermitage Museum, to name a few.

Although less widely seen in Asia, works by the artist can be found extensively in museums across Japan, including Tokyo, Kanagawa, Ibaraki, Kurashiki, Niigata, and Yokohama. Most notably, renowned collector of Western art, Kōjirō Matsukata acquired Portrait of Clemenceau (1889), whose subject, George Clemenceau, was a statesman who acted as prime minister during World War I and famous collector of Japanese woodblock prints and decorative arts. The painting is now in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.