<i>Zola’s Painters</i> . By Robert Lethbridge <i>Zola’s Painters</i> . By LethbridgeRobert. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68.) Cambridge: Legenda, 2022. xii + 230 pp., ill.

Robert Lethbridge’s outstanding study of Zola’s painters brings together the many strands of the naturalist author’s complex engagement with the art and artists of the late nineteenth century. This compelling and persuasive narrative maps the political and aesthetic valences of the perennial dialogues, disputes, dramas, and doubts between Zola and his (erstwhile) friends, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, and others in the Impressionist circle. Beginning with Zola’s avant-garde art criticism and ending with his revisionist return to the Old Masters, Lethbridge presents a deep and nuanced reading of critical writings, novels, and paintings of the period with an eye to the socio-cultural implications of the often vexed relationship between the sister arts in France. Chapter 1, ‘The Novelist as Art Critic’, examines the imbrications of Zola’s myriad writings on contemporary painters and painting with his own developing career as a novelist. Heralding a new approach to art criticism, Zola moved beyond the traditional focus on technique and composition towards a more discursive interpretation of contemporary art, considering social, political, intellectual, and cultural contexts from a predictably oppositional perspective. As Lethbridge notes, ‘Zola was temperamentally incapable of referencing works of art without inserting his own opinion’ (p. 25), and his initial enthusiasm for the Impressionists gave way to ambivalence based on the ever-widening gap between the Impressionists’ canvases, which he thought ‘manquaient de solidité’ (cited, p. 162), and the ‘mimetic imperatives’ of his naturalist aesthetic, privileging accuracy to an ‘invariable’ external reality, ‘la création étant la même pour nous tous’ (cited, p. 6). L’Œuvre, Zola’s novel of an avant-garde painter’s failure, is of course at the heart of Lethbridge’s book, and here he does a marvellous job of weaving the author’s relationships with contemporary artists into our understanding of this 1886 novel’s portraits of painters. While L’Œuvre has been broadly discussed over the years, placing it in a larger study of the novelist’s friendships with and ambivalence towards the Impressionists reveals the competitive core of the novel which led Degas to remark that Zola’s only goal was to demonstrate ‘la supériorité de l’homme de lettres sur l’artiste’ (cited, p. 54). In individual chapters devoted to Cézanne, Manet, and Courbet (all of whom were easily identifiable in L’Œuvre), Lethbridge adds nuance and insight to the interpretation of these complicated friendships. If Zola finally considered the Impressionists ‘incomplets, illogiques, exagérés, impuissants’ (cited, p. 155), we must also remember that, above all, painters served as ‘the mirror of his own self-definition as a novelist and a critic’ (p. 59). The final two chapters, on Zola’s shift in the 1870s to a preference for the landscapes of the Barbizon school and later the Old Masters, further illuminate Zola’s complicated reliance on the refracting mirror of painting to define his own vision as an author. Similarly, his uncertain identification with and self-distancing from Manet, Cézanne, and others reminds us that ultimately Zola is always writing about himself. The possessive in Lethbridge’s canny title, Zola’s Painters, elegantly underscores the fact that in the end, as presented in his essays and novels, they are all Zola’s personal creations.

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