ABSTRACT
In his 1886 novel, L’Œuvre,1 Émile Zola retrospectively recreated the uproarious atmosphere and deafening confusion that accompanied the 1863 Salon des Refusés as painter Claude Lantier, together with five comrades, searches room after room for his rejected canvas. En route they pass both “the excellent and the execrable.” Most notable within the former category is La Dame Blanche (Plate 19), “a curious vision, but seen by the eye of a great artist” that nonetheless provokes a steady stream of “grinning admirers digging each other in the ribs and going off into fits of helpless mirth.” Lantier’s painting entitled Plein-Air portrays two female figures lying on the grass in the far distance, while a frock-coated gentleman and a naked woman recline amid trees in a sun-lit grove in the foreground. Lantier’s Œuvre of the title is a thinly disguised facsimile of Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Like Whistler’s Woman in White, the canvas incites the “seething mass of humanity” to emit its loudest jeers. Speaking in the novel through the voice of writer Pierre Sandoz, Zola railed against the philistine bourgeois spectators. Nevertheless, for posterity these paintings’ indisputable success can be measured sonically by the decibels of derisive laughter each generated. Zola’s novel not only corroborates the camaraderie among writers and painters but also reconstructs the defining moment that forged an enduring link between Whistler and Manet in the imagination of both public and artists.
