Portrait of Paul Verlaine
Eugène Carrière French
Publisher Lemercier & Cie. French
Not on view
Before moving to Paris to study painting, Carrière apprenticed as a lithographer. Even after achieving acclaim as a painter in the 1880s, he continued to produce commercial prints to earn a living; it was only in the 1890s that he finally adopted lithography as an artistic medium. This print adapted his painted portrait of the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1890, Musée d’Orsay) and was published following the writer’s death in 1896. Carrière’s sophisticated knowledge of the lithographic technique enabled him to achieve the characteristic sfumato style of his paintings in print through subtle wiping and delicate scraping of the stone matrix, seen here especially in the wispy strands of Verlaine’s beard.
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