The eighth of nine children of an insurance salesman, Carrière was born at Gournay-sur-Marne (Seine-Saint-Denis) and brought up in Strasbourg, where he received his initial training in art at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin as part of his apprenticeship in commercial lithography.

In 1868, while briefly employed as a lithographer, he visited Paris and was so inspired by the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the Louvre that he resolved to become an artist.

The following year he ended his studies under Cabanel, married Sophie Desmonceaux (with whom he would have seven children) and moved briefly to London where he saw and admired the works of J.M.W.

Success eluded him for a number of years after he returned to Paris and he was forced to find occasional employment, usually with printers to support his growing family.

[3] At the Salon of 1884 one of Carrière’s paintings received an honourable mention, and the influential art critic Roger Marx became a champion of his work.

The cultural world of Paris, from Georges Clemenceau to young artists such as Francis Picabia, was present at his funeral, where Rodin spoke of his "arresting ideas, expressed urgently and with a new clarity, undimmed by his suffering".

The quality of poetic, dreamlike reverie that pervades his work particularly appealed to Symbolist critics such as Charles Morice and Jean Dolent; the latter described Carrière’s art as reality having the magic of dreams.

By employing a subdued palette, softening the focus and enveloping his figures in a thick, dark atmosphere, as in Maternity (c. 1889; Philadelphia, PA, Mus.