Émile Nestor Joseph Carlier was born in Cambrai on 3 January 1849,[1] in the Rue de la Prison, the current location of the town hall.

Then he returned to Cambrai to follow a course of academic study in the workshop of René Fache, where he was a dedicated and studious pupil.

He had his baptism of fire at the advanced posts of Bagneux and at Buzenval in Rueil-Malmaison, where he saw the Orientalist painter Henri Regnault fall.

It was the stone statue of Cambrai chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet which he created in 1876 and was erected in a public garden.

In 1889 after winning his gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he decided to transform his Gilliat, which he exhibited at the Salon of 1890.

That same year, his application for a work of sculpture was dismissed on the ground that in 1889 a statue had been bought at the Salon for the sum of 10,000 francs.

At the end of the 19th century the city of Condé-sur-l'Escaut pre-selected him, as well as Léonie Duquesnoy and Jules Louis Mabille, to create the monument to the memory of actress Claire Josèphe Leris de Latude, a native of this town.

This monument was in several pieces, three of which are now in the André Malraux Cultural Center of Verrières-le-Buisson: an allegory of agriculture and horticulture called Girl with Flowers and two others also in white marble.

The third, "Child Winnowing", signed and dated 1908, is in a small square at the corner of the Market passage and the Jean Simonin alley.

In 1908, after the showing of the monument to the Salon of French Artists, the author asked for it to be temporarily held in the Marble Depot.

[5] He was called to Algiers in 1912 to reproduce the features of the Duc des Cars, General of the Conquest of 1830, and also make the medallion of General Maurice Bailloud, the successor to the previous conqueror, to create a bronze plaque placed on the 50-meter-high (160 feet) obelisk commemorating the dead of the Army of Africa, perched on the heights high on the Emperor Fort, inaugurated by the Governor General of Algeria Charles Lutaud, dated 21 October 1912, and destroyed by explosives for the safety of the inhabitants of Algiers in 1943.

[note 2] He collaborated with the architect Castex on a monumental fountain project for the city of Reims, and sat on the Committee for Reconstruction of Cambrai and participated in other Cambrésien causes.