Emile Zola And Japan

Before Emile Zola (1840-1902) became known as a scandalous novelist and a crusading journalist, he wrote art reviews for Parisian newspapers. As a child, his father's work as an engineer took the family to Aix-en-Provence where Emile got to know his mother's childhood friend - Paul Cezanne. Proximity influenced his interest in art, as did exposure to Japanese prints and their influence on his generation of young artists. That influence is present in Zola's novel A Page Of Love (1878), punctuated by verbal landscapes that attempt to recreate the atmospherics of ukiyo-e prints. Edouard Manet's portrait of Zola at his desk shows the writer surrounded by Japanese prints and a decorated screen.

Oddly, it was only after I chose the paragraphs below as examples that I remembered that Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning - a victim of a clogged chimney.

“There were hollows, as could be divined by the lines of roofs; the Butte des Moulins surged upward, with waves of old slates, while the line of the principal boulevards dipped downward like a gutter, ending in a jumble of houses whose tiles even could no longer be seen. At this early hour the oblique sun did not light up the house-fronts looking toward the Trocadero; not a window-pane of these threw back its rays. The skylights on the roofs alone sparkled with the glittering reflex of mica amid the red of the adjacent chimney-pots.”

“The night-lamp with a bluish shade was burning on the chimney-piece, behind a book, whose shadows plunged more than half the chamber into darkness. There was a quiet gleam of light cutting across the round table and the couch, streaming over the heavy folds of the velvet curtains, and imparting an azure hue to the mirror of the rosewood wardrobe placed between the two windows. The quiet tints of the room, the blue tints of the hangings, furniture, and carpet, served at this hour of night to invest everything with the delightful vagueness of cloudland.”

You may also be interested in Felix Regamey Goes To Japan posted here 24 May 2009 and Merchants Of Desire: Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, poster here 29 November 2008.

Image Credits:

1. Bernard Boutet de Monvel - View of Nemours, undated, Museum of Chateau de Nemours, France.
2. Edouard Manet - Portrait of Emile Zola, 1868, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Text: excerpts from A Love Episode , chapters V and I, by Emile Zola, translator uncredited, published by Societe des Beaux-Arts, Paris, London, New York: 1910.