The Project Gutenberg EBook of His Masterpiece, by Emile Zola

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Title: His Masterpiece

Author: Emile Zola

Editor: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Translator: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Release Date: May 25, 2005 [EBook #15900]
Posting Date: May 30, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIS MASTERPIECE ***

Produced by Dagny; and David Widger

HIS MASTERPIECE

By Emile Zola

Edited, With a Preface, By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

PREFACE

'HIS MASTERPIECE,' which in the original French bears the title of
_L'Oeuvre_, is a strikingly accurate story of artistic life in Paris
during the latter years of the Second Empire. Amusing at times,
extremely pathetic and even painful at others, it not only contributes
a necessary element to the Rougon-Macquart series of novels--a series
illustrative of all phases of life in France within certain dates--but
it also represents a particular period of M. Zola's own career and work.
Some years, indeed, before the latter had made himself known at all
widely as a novelist, he had acquired among Parisian painters and
sculptors considerable notoriety as a revolutionary art critic, a
fervent champion of that 'Open-air' school which came into being during
the Second Empire, and which found its first real master in Edouard
Manet, whose then derided works are regarded, in these later days, as
masterpieces. Manet died before his genius was fully recognised; still
he lived long enough to reap some measure of recognition and to see his
influence triumph in more than one respect among his brother artists.
Indeed, few if any painters left a stronger mark on the art of the
second half of the nineteenth century than he did, even though the
school, which he suggested rather than established, lapsed largely into
mere impressionism--a term, by the way, which he himself coined already
in 1858; for it is an error to attribute it--as is often done--to his
friend and junior, Claude Monet.

It was at the time of the Salon of 1866 that M. Zola, who criticised
that exhibition in the _Evenement_ newspaper,* first came to the front
as an art critic, slashing out, to right