Eugène Carrière, 'Head of a Child', about 1891

The little boy in Eugène Carrière’s delicate, sensitive portrait is almost certainly one of his seven children. It is most likely his second son, Jean-René, who was born in 1888. If so, he is about three years of age.

He seems old beyond his years. His expression is difficult to read because it appears to change. Sometimes the gaze is direct, penetrating. At other times, the large brown eyes seem to question what they see, or else they soften. The full mouth is a little pursed as if he is about to speak. He is pale. The only touch of colour is the soft pink of his lips and around his left eye and cheek. Beneath the childish chubbiness, the bone structure is visible, almost palpable. Carrière’s method was to mark out prominences, curves, hollows and reliefs rather than using line, working like a sculptor.

The boy’s eyebrows have almost vanished, but the long, rather thin hair has an auburn tint. One tress falls over his forehead looking roughly chopped rather than trimmed. Just above his temples, patches of hair seem to be missing. It is as if the whole of the front of the hairline has been shaved and the lock combed down to disguise it. On the left it is difficult to discern where the hair ends and the background begins. This is possibly the result of making the hair appear to move – part of Carrière’s belief that he saw figures before him ‘blurred, shrouded, transfigured’. What he painted was not so much a portrait of the child, but an ethereal vision of him seen through a moving veil. He called this veil ‘atmosphere’. He believed that a human being lives in a translucent atmosphere, ‘as real as a fish swimming in water’.

Carrière started out as a gifted colourist. In his fine portrait of the sculptor Henri Devillez (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), the colours are subtle and warm. He used some blurring together with moments of striking brilliance on the figure of the sculptor. Gradually, Carrière gave up the use of almost anything but black, white and, especially, shades of brown. It appears that this seemingly strange choice came partly from a change in his moral ideal of human philosophy. He became obsessed with the idea of enveloping everything with air and atmosphere. He said: ‘Nothing in nature is completely distinct from anything else. Things emerging from the atmosphere are bathed by it and partly carried away.’

For many years Carrière struggled to make a living. His family were virtually his only models, as we can see in Winding Wool (Tate, London). Eventually, he became not only recognised but also influential. It is believed that Pablo Picasso was interested in his ideas. For many of the paintings in his Blue Period, such as The Old Guitarist (Art Institute of Chicago), Picasso used a restricted palette and elongated figures similar to Carrière’s.