Fantine abandonnée

Fantine abandonnée depicts the tragic heroine of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables at her moment of greatest destitution — cast out, impoverished, and struggling to support her illegitimate daughter Cosette. Eugène Carrière was an admirer of Hugo, and this painting was placed in the Maison de Victor Hugo on the Place des Vosges, the museum dedicated to the author's life and work. Carrière's characteristically atmospheric style — dissolving form in a smoky, indeterminate ground — suits the subject perfectly: Fantine exists in a kind of social and moral fog, a woman whose identity has been stripped from her by economic necessity and social contempt. The commission or donation to the Hugo museum gave the work a literary context that reinforces its emotional program.

Carrière renders the figure of Fantine in his signature monochromatic earth tones, the form emerging from and dissolving back into an almost undifferentiated ground. The technique — dry, dragged pigment with minimal impasto — produces a haunted quality appropriate to a figure who exists on the margins of social visibility.