Looking at Manet

When Édouard Manet’s early paintings were greeted with outrage and derision in the 1860s, Émile Zola sprang to his defense, initiating a friendship that would last until Manet’s death in 1881. Then a young journalist with an eye for controversial causes, Zola was also seeking to launch his own literary career, which would eventually secure for him the reputation as the greatest French novelist of the late nineteenth century.

Zola quickly became Manet’s staunchest champion, defending the pa...