The Origin of Impressionism
The central character, the title and various supporting players are all based upon or inspired by actual historical figures essential to the creation of the French art movement known as Impressionism. The novel features a groundbreaking and radical painting bearing the English title Open Air and the art movement in the novel is pejoratively given the name Open Air school by the establishment which rejects its revolutionary techniques. This is a direct connection to Impressionism being similarly labeled in a negative fashion following the exhibition of Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise. The painter of the “masterpiece” is typically thought to have been inspired by the Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne whose response to the novel was to end a close friendship with the author, but elements of Monet as as well Edouard Manet can also be found within the construction of their fictional artist.
The Commodification of Art
The Open Air movement gains steam with the creation of the Salon des Refusés which acts, as it name implies, as a means of exhibiting paintings and artists which had been refused by the more staid and conventional Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The annual exhibition of that salon had long been the artistic event of the year in Paris, but its stodgy preference for older artists reworking the same themes and ideas over the radical experimentation of younger artists leads to the alternative institution. One of the themes which comes into play in the latter section of the book is the politics going on behind the scenes in the selection of art deemed worthy of display. This political process is revealed to be directly linked to the economics of selling art as much—if not more so—than the actual creative processes involved in producing the final result.
Hereditary Process
The Masterpiece is part of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels following the trajectory of two families over the course of French Second Empire. A vital theme connecting all the novels to each other is the effect of the hereditary process on character. The hereditary strains at work in the artist who has such trouble finishing his masterpiece are a combination of alcoholism and obsessiveness. When combined with the environmental factors that produce a neurotic drive toward perfectionism, the result is portrait of an obsessive artist whose compulsive inability to perfectly replicate the image in his mind with an image on the canvas inexorably drives him toward madness. Little wonder then, that if Cezanne thought the character really was based on him, he might have been moved to sever his relationship with author.
