19th-20th Century, French

Georges-Henri Carré was born in 1878 in Marchais-Beton, a village in Burgundy, France. In his youth he took preparatory courses with a view to enrolling at the Department of Architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. However, following the advice of his drawing teacher, he eventually decided to take up Painting.

With that goal in mind, he moved to Paris in 1896. There he attended and the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), which he abandoned to enter the ateliers of Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921) and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902), where he was introduced to . He soon gained access to the atelier of Fernand Cormon (1845-1924), a prestigious painter and master to great artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

In 1906 Carré was admitted to the , in whose Salon he obtained an honorary mention the following year, a demonstration of the high reputation he already enjoyed. He went on to participate regularly at the Salon until 1913.

He was called up for World War I and sent to the front to act as a topographer. During his spare time, he created watercolours depicting heartrending scenes showing the reality of life in the trenches. After his wife died in 1917, leaving him alone with their two children, he suffered a serious breakdown that affected his art creation.

In the early 1920s he returned to Paris but financial necessity forced him to create a more commercial type of painting. In 1926, owing to health problems he moved to La Puisaye. There he returned to painting rural scenes, gradually changing his technique—he painted mostly with a palette knife, with a more vigorous finish—and darkening his range of colours.

In the summer of 1927 he resettled in Paris, where he began a period of highly intense work, that lasted until 1929, mostly depicting scenes of life in Paris. He took part at the and the , where he would exhibit regularly until his death. In those years his sales increased considerably, standing out among them those made to the French State. Carré had countless solo exhibitions and participated in group shows alongside such major painters as Paul Signac (1863-1935), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) and André Lhote (1885-1962), among others. He garnered widespread acclaim among the critics of the time.

In 1929 he stopped using the palette knife and returned to the paintbrush. As a result, his painting acquired a more lyrical tone. He started to spend time with his mother at Tonnerre, where he settled definitively at the end of 1935, although continuing to exhibit in Paris.

In the summer of 1940, following a journey through Provence, his style underwent a notable change which led to a process of simplification of his painting that he would take to its extreme in the final months of his life. In the autumn of 1944, illness forced him to leave Tonnerre and return to Paris, where his children took care of him until his death, on 25 December 1945.