Maternity

Eugène Carrière, a contemporary of the Impressionists, accomplished the illusion of light on a subject by using starkly contrasting tones and a palette devoid of almost all color. Maternity exemplifies the characteristics of Symbolist art, a movement prevalent in the 1880s and 1890s, with its expression of a religious, almost mystical feeling. The dark background of this work, rendered in a monochromatic palette with shades of blue, gray, and brown, contrasts with the creamy-white skin of mother and child to create a sense of brightness. The grandson and nephew of artists, Carrière began his career as a commercial lithographer. This early experience with printmaking contributed to the dark, monochromatic coloring of the majority of his works. When Carrière’s great-granddaughter, Véronique Milin Dumesnil, visited Hill-Stead in 2003, she revealed that the models for Maternity were his wife and one of their seven children, either Jean René or Leon. Artists and critics alike hailed Carrière as a genius, and he was popular with 19th-century art collectors, especially for his maternity scenes. In 1879, when he was 30 years old, he exhibited Young Mother (La Jeune Mère) at the Salon, which was the first of a long series of depictions of motherhood, for which he had an almost mystical reverence. The themes of family life, including breast-feeding and domestic work, met with increasing success at the Salons, which contributed to keeping the artist working in this genre. On June 5, 1890, Edmond de Goncourt noted: “This Carrière really is the painter of Breast-Feeding. And it’s interesting to study him in his tender specialty, through the few paintings he hasn’t yet sold and in an immense number of drawings which he says are the representation of intimate gestures and which are admirable studies of a mother’s enveloping hands and the heads of nursing infants….” Unlike his peers, such as Monet and Degas, Carrière gradually eliminated all color from his palette. His friendship with the sculptor, Rodin, may explain this withdrawal from color – the light in the picture almost emerging as if from dark stone – and the sculptural aspect of the mother’s bluish hands.