Eugène Carrière, 'Winding Wool', 1887

A little girl holds a hank of wool taut between her hands while a woman patiently winds it into a ball. This is Elise, the daughter of the artist Eugène Carrière, aged about ten years old, with her mother, Sophie Desmonceaux. Elise looks down gravely, perhaps making sure she is holding the wool correctly. Carrière perfectly captured the position of her hand, the thumb erect, the fingers curled slightly, the wrist pulled back to keep the wool tight. Her face is sparingly defined, like a shadow, the eyes downcast, the lips a little pursed with concentration, the chin and forehead rounded. She wears a simple brown dress and her long auburn hair falls past her shoulders.

Sophie’s hand holding the thread of wool is equally sensitively described. The strand is held between her middle finger and thumb. The other fingers are delicately poised as she gently pulls it towards her. Her face is almost hidden. Just her profile is visible, and her ear with its single drop earring. Her luxuriant dark hair glows, caught up in a chignon to reveal the soft folds in her neck. The stark black corset cuts in under her arm and laces up behind her. Its corner juts onto the soft mass of her shoulders in her white blouse. It forms the only hard, straight line in the painting.

With seven children in the family, this is a ritual Carrière must have seen often. For him, it was probably part of the great love he had for them. They lived in a state little short of poverty for many years until he finally gained recognition. Most of his paintings are of the family in single portraits and in groups. In many of them the overriding expression is careworn. Not so in this image. Here, Carrière seems to emphasise the tie between mother and daughter, maybe symbolised by the thread of wool that joins them. Between them, barely visible in the strange brown mist that covers them, is a single rose in a vase almost hovering in the air, perhaps a symbol of his devotion to his wife.

The mist, for Carrière, was the all-important result of changes in his view of painting. He came to believe that nothing was completely distinct and that atmosphere surrounded every form, every living being – that it penetrated and dissolved into it and then exuded from it. This atmosphere, for him, became visible in the light, tawny mist in this painting. Once a great colourist, he reduced his palette to shades of brown, black and white, but his images are saved from monotony by his use of light and expression. Here, the quality of light is especially striking in the glow that emanates from Sophie’s hair, her skin, her white blouse and the intensity of her black corset. The expression is in the quiet dignity of mother and daughter, the exquisite detail of the hands and the almost invisible rose.