The subject of Carrière’s portrayal is always life of deep feeling—self-forgetting maternal love, childhood’s gracious innocence, pathetic tenderness of father, brothers, or sisters. He has never worked from the peddling model who can be hired at five francs an hour, and who poses only with the body, not the soul. His model is his own family, with the whole range of idiosyncrasies which their existence by night and day comprises. What the tender husband and father observed with delighted eyes at all hours, that the painter has uniquely fixed on canvas: the mother resting in bed with her baby at her breast; that sweet, shapeless little lump of human flesh which is a wee boy that the elder sister fondles; the children eating or being fed at table; the washing and dressing of the little one, which the mother and elder sister carry out as a pleasant game with a doll; the mother’s anxiety as she cradles the fever-stricken child in her arms, and tries to quiet it; dressing the eldest girl for her confirmation—a prelude to that affecting moment when the mother, with trembling hands and streaming tears, will place the bridal wreath on her head; the pride of the parents when marshalling all their five children in a row; the gloomy seriousness of the tiny school-girl puzzling at the work-table over her first task. Carrière, when painting his family life, painted the life of mankind. His large, epic style of feeling preserved him from falling into _genre_. He remained monumental even when painting details. He is as little sentimental as Goethe in “Hermann und Dorothea”; nevertheless, tears rise when we gaze on his pictures. The incident disappears, and we stand before the Eternal, which it comprises; before Love, which keeps the world together. The same feature is distinguishable also in his portraits; they ennoble the model by spiritualising it. He gives only just enough of the anatomy to reveal the soul. And when he sets himself greater and more highly differentiated tasks (“The Gallery of the Belleville Theatre,” the “Holy Women at the Foot of the Cross”), he accomplishes them by bringing forth the feelings and thoughts which have brought together the persons concerned, and determine their bearings and movements. What individual works scattered in exhibitions and museums have not proved to every one is made indisputably clear by the 150 reproductions in the Piazza book, viz., that Carrière is one of the noblest, chastest, most deeply-feeling artists of to-day, who has created for himself a peculiar technique, particularly dangerous for imitators, but natural to himself, and, therefore, in his hand, justified. SOME OF CARRIÈRE’S PICTURES