Eugène Carrière

 Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), French painter and lithographer, best known for his spiritual interpretations of family life and maternity. He also painted large canvases for the Sorbonne and the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, as well as portraits of famous men such as Verlaine, Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt.

 Portrait of Isadora Duncan. Montpellier, Musée Fabre, D33.3.1.

 

  Isadora, wishing to express emotions, discovered in Greek art her finest models. Full of admiration for the lovely figures of the bas-reliefs, she adopted them as her inspiration.

  Yet, endowed with the instinct of discovery, she returned to Nature from whence came all these gestures, and thinking to imitate and give rebirth to Greek dancing, she found her own expression. She thinks of the Greeks and obeys but herself; she offers us her own joy and her own grief.

  In demonstrating to us her fine feelings so beautifully, she evokes ours: as before Greek statues revivified a moment for us, we are young again with her and a new hope triumphs within us. And when she expresses her resignation to the inevitable we also resign ourselves.

   "Isadora Duncan's dance is no longer an entertaining diversion; it is a personal manifestation as well as a work of art, livelier and more fecund as an incentive to works which we ourselves are destined to do."