His Masterpiece: A Painter Defeated by His Own Canvas

A painter of enormous ambition cannot finish the picture that would prove him, and his friend the novelist watches. Zola put himself and Cézanne into it; Cézanne read the book, wrote a cold note of thanks, and never spoke to him again. This edition binds fifty-one plates of painting with the text...

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist born in Paris and raised in Aix-en-Provence. He wrote the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, intervened in the Dreyfus affair with the open letter J'accuse, was convicted of libel and fled to England, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning in circumst...