Zola, Manet, and the Impressionists (1875-80)
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J. 
Published: February 2007

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.