The works at the Musée Rodin also include paintings by Auguste Rodin's friend Eugène Carrière (1849-1906). Carrière's idiosyncratic style of blurry black-gray-and-white cloudiness made me think of photographs taken by mediums to prove that what happened at seances was real. "Mère et enfant" (ca. 1891) might be the vision of a grieving widower tricked by a spiritualist into thinking he is communicating with his lost wife and child. At the Musée Rodin, the effect of "Léon Gorodiche et sa famille" (1903) is especially uncanny: This family portrait of father, mother, and child was presumably commisioned by the still quite living Dr. Gorodiche (1864-1940) to celebrate the birth of his first child. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 July 2026)

A painting in a black-brown-and-gray nineteenth-century photographic style of a mother and child embracing. — Carrière, “Mère et enfant”, Musée Rodin, photo by me.

A painting in the same style as the above painting, this time with a mother, father, and baby. — Carrière, “Léon Gorodiche et sa famille”, Musée Rodin, photo by me

The spiritualist effect of paintings by Eugène Carrière at the Musée Rodin