The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-05-28
FTGENE CARRIERE-

Carrieres work is wonderful illustration of evolution within the compass of a lifetime. His early pictures-about 1876-are highly colored, and show the influence of Rubens and Jordans; his later works melt in a symphony of white and brown, and from amid vaporous half-tints appear visions of love, childhood, motherhood, in which reality and poetry mingle in a Wondrous manner altogether peculiar to the artist. Carriere himself, who suppose, never read Goethe, is con- scious of his own evolution and of it's relation to that of vast humanity. In a preface to a catalogue of his pictures written by him in 1876, he wrote:
 Tn the short space of time between birth and death man hardly finds time to tarry on his path and he has scarcely gained consciousness of himself when the end approaches . I see other men in myself, and I see myself in other men; whatever stirs their feel ings is dear to me"
 NM. Piazza and Mason ransa cked Paris and provincial museums and private collections, and no work typical of Carrieres genius is left out Of their album. Looking over it. one observes a constant striving after more purity of form and more poetry. At length a stage of development is reached when form itself is but a means to a higher end. As the artist said a few years ago, forms are nothing in themselves, but exist only in their relation towards other forms. Everything in the end trends towards our own selves, and by mysterious ways. Carriere's early dis like to color, after he had exhausted it's possibilities, is due probably to the fact that the most refined delicacies of form and the most subtle shades of sentiment are best rendered simply as lights and shadows. It would be a great pity if painters in any great num- Der were to paint every thing in brown and grays; but he is at home in this manner, and he has a right to use it since in no other way can he give ex- presson to his feelings
 Carriere's evolution shows year after , form. In order to get at essentials his suppression of details is becoming more and more drastic; even color he looks upon as an accident. Thus in his path upwards, the greater a poet he be- comes, the nearer he approaches real- ty, and in his later works he becomes a prophet of form. The best of his later works (they are not of uniform excel- Ience) are transcendent, and as this word has become much abused and de- based, l only use it on condition that I art is transcendental because it ap- breaches the infinite; details become subordinate to other details, the latter to the whole picture; and the picture itself is subordinate to subtle associa- tions of form, to values expressed, i'm piled and invisible. In word, the ar tist brings you into an atmosphere, into a world, of his own.
 M. Carriere, whose fame has not yet reached the outer public Che never sought popularty) is just over his six tieth year, is full of health and vigor, and M. Geoffroy, his Boswell" be- llGFGo AlC lS IlOI } CL nall W ey lAIOASu II lllS career. He thinks the confession of Hokusai may be applied to him. That Japanese master wrote in 1853 that he did not consider the work he painted before he was seventy years old was worth talking about. He began, he said, at the age of seventy-three to un- derstand the inwardness of nature-an- imals, shrubs, trees, birds, fishes and insects. So with Carriere. There are signs that he is about to enter on new cycle. Hitherto he has been the painter of family life. Henceforth, if I am not mistaken, he will observe pub lie life, social problems, and become. in fact, sort of Tolstoy.-Paris Cores pondence of the London Truth.