Eugène Carrière, the most profound painter of the inner life existing in the French school of to-day, has great analogies with Rodin, both as a man and as an artist. He, too, reduces his art to essentials, to the main lines and the deliberate amplification of surfaces. Thus his figures, bathed in shadow, are akin to Rodin's statues, while the latter, bathed with dewy light, seem to be pictures by Carrière. The painter becomes massive and powerful, the sculptor becomes vaporous. Rodin seeks the bland, half-shadows of Correggio, and Carrière desires that his figures should have the powerful relief of bronze. The painter sacrifices colour to the sole study of values, and by his black-and-white comes back to sculpture. Very curious is this point of junction between two great artists. Rodin is beginning to explain himself with the pen; and Eugène Carrière has, for some years past, been writing--too rarely--passages upon art of which the style is admirable and the concentration of thought astonishing, passages which recall Mallarmé and Baudelaire, and leave far behind the commonplaces of journalistic criticism. Rodin and Carrière have their school, their circle of chosen admirers, and their double influence may soon be the most decisive, if not the most brilliant and the noisiest, in French art of to-day. NUDE FIGURE (PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE OPEN AIR AT TWILIGHT IN THE GARDEN AT MEUDON) The prevailing note of opinion about Rodin among his friends and his detractors is that he is like no one else, and that no statue can, in a manner, be looked at beside his, so individual is the conception from which they spring. By the mere fact that they exist, they compel us to choose between them and the others. Their silhouettes, their planes, the quality of their shadows, and their lights, make them technically works apart. If such a man understands sculpture thus, either he is right, against everybody, or he is totally mistaken; we cannot like him and also approve of ordinary statuary. His psychological and tragic genius conquers the admiration even of those who oppose his material execution. Rodin does not set himself up as a chief, nor recognise followers; yet he is a chief by his very work.