Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Zola's Painters by Robert Lethbridge Claire Moran Zola's Painters. By Robert Lethbridge. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68) Cambridge: Legenda. 2022. xiii+ 230 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–83954–079–0. 'It is difficult to dispute the oft-made claim', as Robert Lethbridge writes in his engaging and meticulously researched monograph on Émile Zola, 'that with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century writer enjoyed such a close relationship with the art of his time' (p. 24). What Lethbridge reveals, however, over the course of six chapters on Zola's art criticism, discussions on Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, landscape painters, and, interestingly, the Old Masters, is the complexity of, as well as the many paradoxes and contradictions that define, that relationship. The book could easily have borne a subtitle borrowed from one of the chapter subheadings such as 'tensions and contradictions' or 'reflections and refractions', since what Lethbridge unearths is the complicated history of nineteenth-century art and the figures which shaped it. Zola is important not only as a critic but also as a chroniqueur, although these roles were largely self-defined. In his articles for the annual Salons, he details facts and figures that remain historically significant. In 1876, for example, he notes 104,775 visitors in the opening week of the Salon, with 50,000 visitors on the final day, a Sunday, when there was no entry fee (p. 12). But it is Zola's role as critic that Lethbridge scrutinizes. Through careful reading of Zola's correspondence from the 1860s to the 1890s, Lethbridge questions Zola's artistic 'apprenticeship' and the relationships and personal and professional motives that moulded it. The writer's self-belief is never in doubt as from the outset, in 1859, shortly after moving from Aix-en-Provence to Paris, he distinguishes himself from 'des personnes qui se piquent de se connaître en peinture et [qu'il voit] au Salon prendre des ânes pour des vaches' (p. 16). Zola's immense contribution to nineteenth-century criticism is well known (between 1863 and 1869 alone he penned almost four dozen reviews on aesthetics, scholarly books by art historians, and illustrated editions), yet it is his writing on Impressionism, most particularly directly and indirectly on Manet, as well as what has been largely understood as a veiled portrait of Cézanne in L'Œuvre, that has gained most critical attention. What Lethbridge's book does in a subtle yet convincing way is to question the relationships that underscore these texts, both critical and fictional. The figure of Claude Lantier looms large, and the mutually admiring yet thorny relationship of Zola and Cézanne could, as the author notes in his Introduction, merit an entire book. In this chapter, which stands out for its sensitive portrayal of a friendship that unravels, not, as art-historical and literary legend would have it, because of Zola's damning and wounding fictional portrait of a desperate artist, but more because of political and ideological differences (most notably surrounding the Dreyfus affair), [End Page 624] religious views, and personal resentments. As Lethbridge argues, theirs was an estrangement that had 'multiple threads' (p. 59). In fact, this emphasis on the many interweaving facets of Zola's criticism and his own relationships and self-projection is what makes each chapter of Zola's Painters such a fascinating read. Lethbridge's discussion of Manet's portrait of Zola (1868) deserves a special mention in its careful delineation of another complex set of overlapping and unanswerable questions […] lodged somewhere between documentary reportage and imaginative play' (p. 111). In many respects, Zola's Painters offers an excellent example of why scholarly work on the nineteenth century is so important: the myths and half-truths, as well as the political, social, and personal complexities which shaped the art and literature of the period and their reception, need to be fully interrogated, even if we are left with more intriguing questions than satisfying answers. Claire Moran Queen's University Belfast Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association