Zola and the Science of Painting

Abstract

The article explores a paradox in Zola's writing: the resistance to advances in scientific theory by the author of Du Progrès dans les sciences et dans la poésie (1864), as the first of many such assimilations of scientific progress and artistic trends. This is exemplified by the challenge posed to his Naturalist aesthetic by Michel-Eugène Chevreul's seminal De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839), popularised during the period of Zola's most sustained art criticism. This radical revision of the science of optics is increasingly accommodated in contemporary painting, from 1880 onwards, at the very moment of Zola's disenchantment with Impressionism. Although L'Œuvre, his novel of 1886, is set in the Second Empire (consistent with the historical limits of Les Rougon-Macquart), Zola inserts into his narrative the theory of complementary colours, the awkward anachronism notwithstanding, to explain his fictional painter's creative impotence. In relation to the latter, the article looks in detail at the genesis and textual details of a key passage in the novel in which Zola's irony at the expense of Chevreul's theories is almost explicit. At least as telling is his response to unsolicited advice about them: ‘J’ai plus de confiance dans l'observation directe que dans la théorie’. One could hardly conjure up a more succinct summary of Zola's unreconstructed approach to the science of painting which simultaneously testifies to his own principles of representation.