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Zola, Manet, and the Impressionists (1875-80)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

F. W. J. Hemmings
F. W. J. Hemmings*
Affiliation:
University oe Leicester, Leicester, Eng.
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Extract

No major French writer in the nineteenth century, with the questionable exception of Baudelaire, had closer and more enduring personal relations with painters than Zola. At the bottom of this was an element of luck: the good fortune that gave him Paul Cézanne as school fellow at Aix. Cézanne is commonly credited with having first tutored Zola in the appreciation of modern art by conducting him round the Salon des Refusés in 1863. It was mainly through Cézanne that Zola first came into direct contact with painters: with Pissarro, who had been a fellow student of Cézanne when the latter was attending the Académie Suisse in 1861; and subsequently with Bazille and Monet who in 1865 were sharing a studio which Cézanne and Pissarro would occasionally visit. Pissarro and Bazille were regular guests at the Thursday evening gatherings that Zola inaugurated when he set up house with his future wife in 1866. A series of staccato, memory-laden notes, put on paper twenty years later, recall the atmosphere of those days: “A Paris. Nouveaux amis… . Arrivée de Baille et de Cézanne. Nos réunions du jeudi.—Paris à conquérir, promenades, dédain. Les musées … les cafés.” Of the cafés Zola had here in mind, history has preserved the name of one only, the Guerbois, in the Batignolles district. His wife, long after his death, contested the tradition that makes Zola a one-time pillar of this establishment (“a-t-on assez parlé de ce café Guerbois où mon cher mari n'allait presque jamais”), but we are not obliged to see in this declaration more than a misguided attempt to censor what accorded ill with the cherished image of her husband as the respectable, home-loving citizen. Rather, it was the bohemian but unsociable Cézanne whose appearances at the Café Guerbois were infrequent. Zola would have listened here to critics such as Duranty (whom he had seen before, during business hours, at Hachette's) and Philippe Burty, and to a number of painters totally unknown at that time to the wider public—Bazille and Fantin-Latour, Degas, a formidable debater, Monet, rather shyer in argument, Renoir, sceptical and amused at Zola's downrightness, Pissarro, the eldest of them all, the father of a family lodging outside Paris, the Belgian Alfred Stevens, the American Whistler. One of the “regulars” was Antoine Guillemet, a young landscape painter who in 1866 took Zola to visit Manet at his studio. Here the debutant author of La confession de Claude heard from the master the story of his artistic apprenticeship and was able to study the canvases on which he was working. The seeds of a lifelong friendship were sown, the first fruits of which were the special article on Manet which Zola inserted as part of his first Salon in L'Evénement (7 May 1866), and the later study written for the Revue du XIXe Siècle and republished separately as a brochure in 1867.Manet's gratitude for these “remarkable” articles was expressed in two cordial letters and, possibly, in the offer to illustrate a de luxe edition of the Contes à Ninon} This particular project went adrift, but later in the year Zola began sitting for his portrait, which Manet completed in time for the 1868 Salon. Thanks largely to Dau-bigny's intervention, the group of painters later to be known as the Impressionists were well represented in that year's exhibition. Zola reviewed their work in a further series of articles, this time in L'Evénement illustré. Though his expressions were a little more sedate than those he had used in 1866, there was no perceptible slackening in his fervour for Manet (discussed 10 May) or for Pissarro and Monet (19 and 24 May). Cézanne's submissions were, that year as formerly, rejected, so that Zola lacked a pretext to give him critical encouragement even had he wished to. Further proof of Zola's popularity among the so-called Batignolles school is provided by the evidence of two large canvases painted early in 1870, in both of which he features: Bazille's picture of his studio, where Zola is seen chatting to Renoir, and the more formally grouped “Atelier aux Batignolles” by Fantin-Latour.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1958 , pp. 407 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 407 Dossier of L'œuvre, B.N. MS. 10316, fol. 316 (Nouvelles acquisitions françaises).

Note 2 in page 407 Reported by F. Doucet, L'esthétique de Zola (The Hague, 1923), p. 114.

Note 3 in page 407 “Une nouvelle manière en peinture—Edouard Manet,” Revue du XIXe Siècle, ??, ? (1 Jan. 1867), 43-64; Edouard Manet, étude biographique et critique (Paris: Dentu, 1867).

Note 4 in page 407 Printed in P. Jamot and G. Wildenstein, Manet (Paris, 1932), pp. 81-82.

Note 5 in page 407 Letter from Zola to Lacroix dated 8 May 1867. See A. Brisson, L'envers de la gloire, enquêtes et documents inédits (Paris, 1904), p. 79.

Note 6 in page 408 Ima ?. Ebin, “Manet and Zola,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, xxvii (1945), 357-378; George H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1945).

Note 7 in page 408 They have been published in translation by Rewald, The History of Impressionism (New York, 1946), pp. 291-292.

Note 8 in page 408 Cézanne, Letters, ed. Rewald (Oxford, 1941), pp. 109 ff.

Note 9 in page 408 Moore, “My Impressions of Zola,” English Illustrated Magazine, xi (1894), 477. Cf. also a letter Moore wrote Zola in 1882: “Mais peut-être vous ne souvenez pas de moi… . M. Manet un de mes grands amis, m'a présenté à vous au bal de l'Assommoir …” Textual quotation by Auriant, “Un disciple anglais d'Emile Zola: George Moore,” Mercure de France, ccxcvn (1940), 312-313.

Note 10 in page 408 See Michel Robida, “Le Salon Charpentier,” Revue de Paris, ixn (1955), 42-60.

Note 11 in page 408 G. Bazin, L'époque impressionniste (Paris, 1953), p. 37.

Note 12 in page 409 “Pro Domo Mea,” pp. 269-274 in the Bernouard edition of Une campagne, originally in Le Figaro, 18 July 1881.

Note 13 in page 409 Manet and His Critics, p. 126.

Note 14 in page 409 Le Moniteur (11 May 1868) and Le Siècle (26 June 1868), both quoted in A. Tabarant, Manet et ses œuvres (Paris, 1947), pp. 148, 149.

Note 15 in page 409 Manet and His Critics, pp. 217, 126.

Note 16 in page 409 La Cloche (24 Jan. 1872), reprinted by M. Le Blond in the volume Mélanges of Zola's works (Bernouard ed.).

Note 17 in page 409 19 May 1873 and succeeding issues.

Note 18 in page 409 Le Voltaire was started too late to carry a review of the 1878 exhibition, and in 1880 Huysmans published his salon in La Réforme; in Le Voltaire that year the exhibition was covered by a hack reporter signing with a pseudonym, since Zola's series “Le naturalisme au salon” (discussed below) were not a salon in the accepted sense.

Note 19 in page 409 Letter (in Russian) published in M. K. Lemke, M. M. Stasyulevitch i ego sovremenniki ? ikh perepiske (St. Petersburg, 1912), iii, 48.

Note 20 in page 410 Veslnik Evropy, ? (1875), t. iii, 886; succeeding quotations taken from the next two pages. 21 Salons (Paris, 1892), p, 179. 22 Quoted by Tabarant, p. 264.

Note 23 in page 411 Vesinik Evropy, xi (1876), t. iii, 878. Zola is guilty of slight exaggeration: Manet's entries in 1866 were not hung, and in 1867 he submitted nothing. In 1874 his “Chemin de fer” was accepted, but two other pictures, “Bal masqué à l'Opéra” and “Hirondelles,” were thrown out.

Note 24 in page 411 Ibid., p. 898.

Note 25 in page 411 Evénement illustré (10 May) : “il est avant tout un naturaliste.” ?. P. Gauthier, (“Zola on Naturalism in Art and History,” MLN, LXX [1955], 514-517) gives a rendering of the last three sentences of the passage just cited, with the quite erroneous comment: “None of his art criticisms published in French … use the term naturalism in connection with painting.” It is in any case common knowledge that Castagnary and, before him, Baudelaire had used the term freely; Zola's only innovation was to apply it to literature.

Note 26 in page 411 It had been coined by an obscure journalist, Louis Leroy, in a caustic review published in Charivari of the First (1874) Impressionist exhibition. The word had been suggested to him by the title of one of Monet's canvases, “Impression, soleil levant.”

Note 27 in page 411 Revue des Deux Mondes, XLVI (1876), 515-516.

Note 28 in page 412 Vestnik Evropy, xi (1876), t. iii, 901; succeeding quotations up to p. 903. 29 Letter dated 10 May 1883 (Correspondance, p. 595). 30 Bazin, op. cit., p. 34.

Note 31 in page 413 Vestnik Evropy, XIII (1878), t. iv, 398.

Note 32 in page 413 Ibid., xiv (1879), t. iv, 399-106. A second section was devoted to Paul Foucher's stage version of Notre-Dame de Paris, the remainder to a discussion of Gautier, prompted by Bergerat's recent book on him: this part of the article was reprinted in Le Bien public (29 July 1879), and ultimately in Documents littéraires.

Note 33 in page 414 The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne (London, 1950), p. 119. Rewald's remarks occur in an analysis of L'œuvre, and provide a good illustration of the dangers inherent in basing conclusions about an author's ideas on an interpretation of his fiction.

Note 34 in page 414 Zola semeur d'orages (Paris, 1952), p. 23.

Note 35 in page 414 This article, and the ensuing exchange of letters between Zola, Manet, and Racot, were reprinted by E. Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même (Paris, 1926), ii, 58-63, and by Jamot and Wildenstein, Manet, pp. 96-97. They have been copied extensively since by biographers of Manet and historians of Impressionism.

Note 36 in page 415 Vestnik Evropy, xiv (1879), t. iv, p. 402.

Note 37 in page 415 Le Voltaire, No. 19, 22 June 1880.

Note 38 in page 415 This preface has been reprinted as an appendix to Mes haines, Bernouard ed. I quote from p. 306.

Note 39 in page 415 And simultaneously in Veslnik Evropy, xv (1880) t. iii, 858-882.

Note 40 in page 416 This deficiency will, it is hoped, be remedied shortly. Robert J. Niess, of the Univ. of Michigan, and I are at present engaged in preparing an edition of Zola's art criticism which will include all the salons mentioned.

Note 41 in page 416 H. Hertz, “Emile Zola témoin de la vérité,” Europe, xxx (1952), 32-33.

Note 42 in page 416 Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlàndischen Literatur (Bern, 1946), pp. 451-452.

Note 43 in page 416 “The Art of the Flashback,” PMLA, lvii (Dec. 1942) 1158. Mention too should be made of articles by Jean Adhémar, “De quelques sources iconographiques des romans de Zola,” in the Catalogue de l'Exposition Emile Zola à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1952), and by Hélène and Jean Adhémar, “Zola et la peinture,” Arts, No. 389, 12-18 Dec. 1952, p. 10.