As Canaille Mauclair says:  “Carriere was first influenced by the Spaniards, then by Ver Meer and Chardin ... formerly he coloured his canvas with exquisite delicacy and with a distinction of harmonies that came very near to Whistler’s.  Now he confines himself to bistre, black and white, to evoke those dream pictures, true images of souls, which make him inimitable in our epoch and go back to Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro.”  Colour went by the board at the last, and the painter was dominated by expression alone.  His gamut of tones became contracted.  “Physical magnetism” is exactly the phrase that illuminates his later methods.  Often cavernous in tone, sooty in his blacks, he nevertheless contrives a fluid atmosphere, the shadows floating, the figure floating, that arrests instant attention.  He became almost sculptural, handled his planes with imposing breadth, his sense of values was strong, his gradations and degradation of tones masterly; and he escaped the influences of the new men in their researches after luminosity at all hazards.  He considered impressionism a transition; after purifying muddy palettes of the academics, the division-of-tones painters must necessarily return to lofty composition, to a poetic simplicity with nature, to a more rarefied psychology.

Carriere, notwithstanding his nocturnal reveries, his sombre colouring, was not a pessimist.  Indeed, the reverse.  His philosophy of life was exalted—­an exalted socialism.  He was, to employ Nietzsche’s pithy phrase, a “Yes-Sayer”; he said “Yes” to the universe.  A man of vigorous affirmations, he worshipped nature, not for its pictorial aspects, but for the god which is the leaf and rock and animal, for the god that beats in our pulses and shines in the clear sunlight.  Nor was it vague, windy pantheism, this; he was a believer—­a glance at his Christ reveals his reverence for the Man of Sorrows—­and his religious love and pity for mankind was only excelled by his hatred of wrong and oppression.  He detested cruelty.  His canvases of childhood, in which he exposes the most evanescent gesture, exposes the unconscious helplessness of babyhood, are so many tracts—­if you choose to see them after that fashion—­in behalf of mercy to all tender and living things.  He is not, however, a sentimentalist.  His family groups prove the absence of theatrical pity.  Because of his subtle technical method, his manner of building up his heads in a misty medium and then abstracting their physical non-essentials, his portraits have a metaphysical meaning—­they are a Becoming, not a Being, tangible though they be.  Their fluid rhythms lend to them almost the quality of a perpetual rejuvenescence.  This may be an illusion, but it tells us of the primary intensity of the painter’s vision.  Withal, there is no scene of the merely spectral, no optical trickery.  The waves of light are magnetic.  The picture floats in space, seemingly compelled by its frame into limits.  Gustave Geffroy once wrote that, in common with the great masters, Carriere, on his canvas, gives a sense of volume and weight.  Whatever he sacrificed, it was not actuality.  His draughtsmanship never falters, his touch is never infirm.