I have seen his portraits of Verlaine, Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Geffroy, of the artist himself and many others.  The Verlaine is a veritable evocation.  It was painted at one seance of several hours, and the poet, it is said, did not sit still or keep silence for a moment.  He was hardly conscious that he was being painted.  What a head!  Not that of the old faun and absinthe-sipping vagabond of the Latin quarter, but the soul that lurked somewhere in Verlaine; the dreamer, not the mystifier, the man crucified to the cross of aspiration by his unhappy temperament.  Musician and child, here is the head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty roads in the Middle Ages.  It needed an unusual painter to interpret an unusual poet.

The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains the racial affinities of the romancer.  Here he is David, not Daudet.  The head of De Goncourt gives in a few touches—­Carriere is ever master of the essential—­the irritable pontiff of literary impressionism.  Carriere was fond of repeating:  “For the artist the forms evoke ideas, sensations, and sentiments; for the poet, sensations, ideas, sentiments evoke forms.”  Never expansively lyrical as was Monticelli, Carriere declared that a picture is the logical development of light.  And on the external side his art is a continual variation with light as a theme.  Morice contends that he was a colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carriere are not monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature coloured.  Certainly Carriere does not sacrifice style, expression, composition for splashing hues.  Yet his illuminating strokes appear to proceed from within, not from without.  He interrogates nature, but her answer is a sober, not a brilliant one.  Let us rather say that his colouring is adequate—­he always asserted that a sense of proportion was success in art.  His tone is peculiarly personal; he paints expressions, the fleeting shades that cross the face of a man, a woman, a child.  He patiently awaits the master trait of a soul and never misses it, though never displaying it with the happy cruelty of Sargent and always judging mercifully.  Notwithstanding his humble attitude in the presence of nature, he is the most self-revealing of painters.  Few before him ever interpreted maternity as he has done.

Carriere is not a virtuoso.  He is an initiator—­a man of rare imagination.  Above all, he escapes the rhetoric of the schools.  His apprehension of character is that of sympathetic genius.  He divines the emotions, especially in those souls made melancholy by sorrow; uneasy, complex, feverish souls; them that hide their griefs, and souls saturated with the ennuis of existence—­to all he is interpreter and consoler.  He has pictured the Weltschmerz of his age; and without morbid self-enjoyment.  A noble soul, an elevating example to those artists who believe that art and life may be dissociated.  Carriere has left no school, though his spiritual influence has been great.  A self-contained artist, going his own way, meditating deeply on art, on life, his canvases stand for his singleness and purity of purpose.  On the purely pictorial side he is, to quote M. Mauclair, “an absolutely surprising painter of hands and glances.”