The Contemplator (1901): Art, History and Details

The Contemplator (1901) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Carrière (French, 1849–1906).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This painting illustrating Victor Hugo's poem Boaz Sleeping is one of five images Carrière created to commemorate the centennial of Hugo's birth. A reclining poet gazes at the stars above, as if in a dream, placing one hand over his heart and gesturing toward a crescent moon. The moon was thought to exert a special influence on poets and artists, inspiring not only creativity but darker thoughts of melancholy and suicide.

Object facts

• Title: The Contemplator
• Date: 1901
• Creator attribution: Eugène Carrière (French, 1849–1906)
• Culture: France, late 19th-early 20th Century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 47.6 x 57.2 x 5.1 cm (18 3/4 x 22 1/2 x 2 in.); Unframed: 33.6 x 41 cm (13 1/4 x 16 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1946.283

A detail from the museum

In this painting Carrière captures the atmosphere of Victor Hugo's poems through his expressive brushstrokes and monochromatic palette. The artist's monochrome paintings influenced Picasso and his Blue Period works.

Collection credit

In memory of Ralph King, gift of Mrs. Ralph King; Ralph T. Woods, Charles G. King; and Frances King Schafer

Further reading listed by the museum

• Carrière, Eugène, and Gabriel Séailles. Exposition de l'œuvre de Eugène Carrière au palais de l'école nationale des beaux-arts, quai malaquais, mai-juin 1907: catalogue des œuvres exposées. Paris, France: Imprimerie Georges Petit, 1907.
• Francis, Henry S. "Paintings." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXIV, no. 2 (February, 1947): 24.
• Carrière, Jean-René. De la Vie d'Eugène Carrière, souvenirs, lettres, pensées, documents. Toulouse, France: E. Privat, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.