HIS MASTERPIECE-ZOLA AND CEZANNE IN PARIS

I have been rereading the old translation of Zola's 1886 novel L'Oeuvre. In English it is known as The Masterpiece or His Masterpiece. It is not a good book-by Zola's own standards - it follows Germinal and does not live up to that spectacular drama. It gives a picture of the Paris art world which is tolerable but hardly subtle. This is the work which is thought to have hastened or completed the estrangement between Zola and his childhood friend  Cézanne. There is no clear cut evidence that this is the case. But Cézanne himself and his Aixois friends from childhood would have had no difficulty in recognising the account of their adolescence. Zola had been  happy to use Cézanne père as material   so why not his oldest and supposedly dearest friend?   This is the sort of cannibalism  into which authors are prone to fall when they are short of material. Cézanne had also painted at Bennecourt which features in the early part of the book, in the company of Zola and Valabrègue.To be fair to Zola he does try to blur the issue-a little. One of Claude's paintings appears to derive from Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe . Manet had just died and he at least was in no position to complain.

At one point  Zola describes Claude as painting a major project from a viewpoint on the right bank of the Seine under the  Pont des Sts Pères (nowadays the Pont du Carrousel) . This is the work which brings him to disaster. It  must be said that the imagined painting does not sound like any known work by Cézanne. It is a slightly symbolist view-towards the  Pont des Arts and the Cité. It will include-and this gives rise to serious difficulties- a nude female in a boat. She is apparently symbolic of something though this is not made clear. The writer Sandoz (Zola) finds this odd, to say the least.So we must imagine this scene containing a skiff with a naked woman at the prow. Claude cannot leave the figure alone and his creative torment leads eventually to his destruction.

Cézanne/Lantier is described as  working from the quayside oblivious of the traffic on the bridge above, in what seems to be an isolated location . In the foreground of the imaginary scene is the Port St Nicholas where sacks of plaster are being unloaded by the crane known as La Sophia.The Port St Nicholas was just adjacent to the Louvre (and sometimes known as the Port du Louvre) and Zola describes a crane and the bags of plaster being unloaded.The postcard below is entitled Port des Saints Pères but is evidently the same area,just upstream of the bridge..

This is a  photograph courtesy of CPA-Bastille91.com which dates from circa 1900 and shows the busy quayside. Perhaps this image best illustrates something of Zola's imaginary composition. You can  see the Pont des Arts-the first bridge quite clearly.On the right of the image the dome of the Institut de France is prominent. In the distance you can see the flèche of the Sainte-Chapelle and then the towers of Notre Dame.

 

This is the pont des Saints Pères in a drawing from the early 1880s by Ottin.Below it the Port St Nicholas/Port du Louvre.The view is looking upstream. You can see a steam crane unloading sand.Quayside scenes are quite common in the work of avant-garde painters of the time. Monet and Guillaumin come immediately to mind. Cranes-les grues-also appear in images by Signac and Dubois-Pillet.