Mother and Child

By 1885 the mother and child had become the subject Eugene Carriere would paint for the rest of his life, and almost every version of it came out of his own home. The models here were his wife and one of their children, and the couple had seven, caught in the ordinary act of holding an infant close. He works in a narrow range of warm browns, the faces and hands lit softly while everything around them sinks into a smoky dark, so the two figures seem to rise out of the shadow and fold back into it. There is no room, no furniture, almost no detail to fix a time or a place. That is why these pictures read less as family portraits than as something older and plainer about being held. He gave motherhood an almost religious seriousness and painted it again and again, straight from the life going on in his own house.