Gabriel Seailles has written a study, Eugene Carriere, l’Homme et l’Artiste, and Charles Morice has published another, Eugene Carriere.  The latter deals with the personality and ideas of one of the most original thinkers among modern French painters.  We have spoken of the acerbity of Degas, of his wit, so often borrowed by Whistler and Manet; we have read Eugene Fromentin’s delightful, stimulating studies of the old masters, but we doubt if Fromentin was as profound a thinker as Carriere.  Degas is not, though he deals in a more acid and dangerous form of aphorism.  It is one of the charms of the eulogy of M. Morice to find embalmed therein so many phrases and speeches of the dead painter.  He was both poet and philosopher, let us call him a seer, for his work fully bears out this appellation.  A grand visionary, he well deserves Jean Dolent’s description of his pictures as “realities having the magic of a dream.”

Carriere’s career was in no wise extraordinary.  He fled to no exotic climes as did Paul Gauguin.  His only tragedy was the manner of his death.  For three years previous he suffered the agonies of a cancer.  His bravery was admirable.  No one heard him complain.  He worked to the last, worked as he had worked his life long, untiringly.  Morice gives a “succinct biography” at the close of his study.  From it we learn that Eugene Carriere was born January 29, 1849, at Gournay (Seine-Inferieure); that he made his first steps in art at the Strasbourg Academy; in 1869 he entered the Beaux-Arts, in Cabanel’s class.  Penniless, he earned a precarious existence in designing industrial objects.  In 1870 he was made prisoner by the Prussians, with the garrison of Neuf-Brisach, and taken to Dresden, where he was confined in prison.  After peace had been declared he resumed his studies at the Beaux-Arts.  In 1877 he married—­an important event in his art; thenceforward Madame Carriere and the children born to them were his continual models, both by preference and also by force of circumstances—­he was too poor in the beginning to hire professional models.  He spent six months in London, which may or may not account for his brumous colour; and in 1879, when he was thirty years old, he exposed in the Salon of that year his Young Mother, the first of a long series of Maternities.  He was violently attacked by the critics, and as violently defended.  During the same year he attempted to win the “prix de Rome” and gained honours for his sketch.  Luckily he did not attain this prize; and, still more luck, he left the school.

In 1884 he received an honourable mention for a child’s portrait; in 1885 a medal for his Sick Child, bought by the State; in 1886 Le Premier voile was bought by the State and he was proposed for a medal of honour and—­singular dream of Frenchmen—­he was decorated in 1889.  He died March 27, 1906.  Not a long, but a full life, a happy one, and at the last, glory—­“le soleil des morts,” as Balzac said—­and a competence for his