Paul Cezanne & Emile Zola: Friends

Continuing his interest in nineteenth century artists, Barrie Sheppard looks at the friendship between artist Paul Cezanne and writer Emile Zola. Barrie writes: Paul Cezanne was born in Aix en Provence on January 19, 1839, Emile Zola in Paris in 1840.  However, Zola spent his youth in Aix en Provence where his father, an engineer, worked on the construction of a public water reticulation system. Paul and Emile, and a third boy, Baptiste Baille, became close friends. As adults, Baille became a distinguished scientist; Cezanne, the artist, and Zola the novelist and art critic, remained particularly close.

The three boys enjoyed an idyllic childhood, Described as the “inseparables” by Zola, they romped the countryside around Aix delighting and luxuriating in the natural world, resting during their ramblings to take pleasure in the reading of poetry and prose literature. Zola, in his novel, L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece), drew on the experience of the inseparables to describe the childhood friendship of his characters:

… their hearts beat faster as they recalled the carefree days out of school , in the fresh air and sunshine of Provence. While they were still at Junior school the three inseparables had developed a passion for long walks. Not even a half-holiday went by without their covering a good few miles and, as they grew older and more venturesome, their rambles covered all the surrounding district and even on occasion took them away from home for days at a time. They would spend the night wherever they happened to be, under a hollow rock, on the hot threshing-floor of a barn, with new made straw for a bedding, or in some deserted hut where  they would make themselves a couch of lavender and thyme. In their unthinking boyhood worship of trees and hills and streams, and in the boundless joy of being alone and free, they found an escape from the matter-of-fact world, and instinctively let themselves be drawn to the bosom of Nature.

The Cezanne/Zola friendship lasted well beyond their youth. When Cezanne abandoned his studies in law in 1861 and moved to Paris in the April of that year to pursue a career as an artist, Zola wrote to Baille of their friend’s coming with abounding enthusiasm:

I’ve seen Paul, do you understand that… do you understand the full melody of those three words. He came this morning…to call me several times on my stairs. I was half asleep. I opened my door trembling with joy and we embraced hard…

However, the pressures of their adult lives in Paris brought regretted change, as would be expected, but the friendship did not dim. Zola wrote:

ˆHelas! (Alas). It’s not like Aix anymore, when we were 18 and free and without a care about the future. The pressure of life, working separately, keeps us apart now In the mornings. Paul goes to the Suisse (an informal artists’ studio where artists were free to pursue their art) and I stay and write in my room. We lunch at eleven, each to his own. Sometimes I go to his room and he works on my portrait…

Unable to make his way as an artist in Paris, Cezanne, despondent, returned to Aix and took up a position in his father’s bank. He did, though, re-enrol in the Aix drawing school.

In 1862, he was back in Paris, working at the Academie Suisse,  where he resumed his acquaintance with Pissarro, and met Monet, Renoir and Sisley. He applied for entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was rejected on the grounds that, although he had the temperament of a colourist, his paintings were “overdone”. This was the precursor to a series of submissions rejected by the Paris Academy and its Salon.

While Cezanne struggled to gain recognition by the Paris art establishment, Zola’s career flourished, flourished to the point of him becoming a leading novelist in the French naturalist literary movement – the realistic depiction of the human character, psychologically and morally, in contemporary society. His major work was his Rougon-Marquart, subtitled “The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”. It consisted of a cycle of 20 novels, which made him a household name in France. The fourteenth in the sequence, The Masterpiece, (1886) is the tragedy of a failed artist, Claude Lentier, who eventually hangs himself before a portrait of a woman he is unable to “realise” in paint to his exacting expectations.

In an earlier novel in the sequence, Lentier appears as a simple young man who, temperamentally and physically (including his dress), resembles the young Cezanne. Many readers came to believe that Lentier was a fictionalised portrait of Cezanne.

On publication of The Masterpiece Zola sent a complimentary copy to Cezanne. On receipt of it, Cezanne replied immediately, having already read the novel in its serial publication.

I have just received L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) you were kind enough to send me. I thank the author of the Rougon-Macquart for this kind token of remembrance, and ask him to allow me to shake his hand thinking of years gone by. Tout-a-toi (All yours) With the feeling of time passing, Paul Cezanne

There being no evidence of further Cezanne letters to Zola, it is believed by many that Zola’s novel caused a deep rift in the long-time friendship of the two artists.

Against the view that Lentier was Cezanne fictionalised, the novelist Balzac, Zola’s exemplar writer, insisted that naturalist fictional characters are not portraits of actual individuals; rather they are types. For him Zola’s Lentier is an amalgam of Manet and Cezanne, with a dash of Zola himself. Furthermore, he said other characters in the novel are amalgams: the artist Bogrand, for example, is a combination of Manet with elements of Courbet, Daubigny, Delacroix and Millet.

Manet didn’t see any of the Zola’s characters resembling contemporary artists. His concern was the novel’s effect on the reputation of the Impressionists among both the press and the general public:

You have taken deliberate care that none of your characters resemble any of us, but even so I fear that our enemies in the press and the public will utter the names of Manet or even one of us to make us out to be failures, which I don’t believe you had in mind. Forgive me for saying so. It is not a criticism. I have read L’Oeuvre with great pleasure….

Despite disparate views about the real-life source of Zola’s Lentier, the novel became, for many, an accepted source of knowledge of Cezanne’s temperament.

Lentier was described as being stunted socially – a phobic sociopath, and an emotional cripple, living in dread of what life has in store for him, and more. This description, claims Alex Danchev in his biography of Cezanne (Cezanne: A Life, Profile Books, 2013), was grafted onto Cezanne, the novel proving a seedbed or breeding ground for the Cezanne legend.

It is true that Cezanne’s temperament did invite the comparison, but to a much lesser extent, suggests Danchev. Cezanne was awkward with women and tended to avoid their company. He was, apparently, as Renoir put it, as “prickly as a hedgehog”, and, according to Zola himself, easily thwarted by obstructions that others handled with ease. Furthermore, he did struggle to realise his visions in paint. He worked slowly, at snail-pace, there often being hours between one brush-stroke and the next. In frustration, he often destroyed works in progress rather than persist with them. On his death, his studio was found to be all but empty.

Of Cezanne’s letter to Zola, much more, says Danchev, has been made of it than can be reasonably claimed,. True, he says, it is formal in tone; however, personal letter-writing was generally so at that time, and Cezanne was no exception. Further, there is no anger in the tone, which he was quite capable of expressing. To a Francisco Oller, a former fellow artist at the Academie Suisse, he once wrote: Monsieur, The officious tone that you have adopted towards me of late and the rather offhand manner you permitted yourself to use towards me on departure are not calculated to please me. I have determined not to receive you in my father’s house….ˆ

Cezanne’s expression of the sentiments of friendship present and past in his letter  may have been sincere, but it may have been so only at the time of writing. Or, on the other hand, it may have been tinged then with sarcasm.

Much has been written about Cezanne’s complex temperament which has lent support to those who have seen Zola’s Lentier as a portrait of Cezanne – by those who see the novel as a roman a clef – a novel in which characters are representations of actual people with invented names.

A frequent assessment of the painter’s temperament was that he suffered “inquietude” – a pathological condition of anxiety and restlessness, a form of mental illness. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in an influential essay, “Cezanne’s Doubt” (1945), described the condition as the “psychological disequilibrium” of a “schizoid make-up”!

“Inquietude”, however, came to be regarded by some as a kind of badge of honour, rather than a stigma. –  considered, that is, to be a natural, important element of the true artistic temperament. For Picasso, it made Cezanne the great artist that he was – his “inquietude” being essential to his becoming the pioneer of modern art that he was – a trait more important than the art he produced:

It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezanne wouldn’t be of the slightest interest to me if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Emile Blanch (a 19^th C. French portrait painter), even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What is of interest to us is Cezanne’s” inquietude”, that is Cezanne’s lesson….  from,Christian Zervos, Conversations with Picasso 1935)

Whatever the truth may be about the inspiration for Zola’s Lentier, or the truth and importance of Cezanne’s psychological condition, what is of interest today is, of course, the legacy of his art and its significance – not his temperament.

Thank you, Barrie, for adding another dimension to our appreciation of the world of French creatives in the nineteenth century.

PS: Readers may be interested in watching a cinematic version of the friendship between Cezanne and Zola in Cezanne et Moi, 2016 by Danièle Thompson.

References: Danchev, Paul, Cezanne, A Life, Profile Books, London, 2013, Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Cezanne, Taschen, Online: numerous websites