Émile Zola
Translated by Thomas Walton
Translation revised and introduced by Roger Pearson
10 July 2008
ISBN: 9780199536917
400 pages
Paperback
196x129mm
In Stock
Price: £8.99The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful novelist, Claude's originality is mocked at the Salon and turns gradually into a doomed obsession with one great canvas. Life - in the form of his model and wife Christine and their deformed child Jacques - is sacrificed on the altar of Art.
The Masterpiece is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it provides a unique
insight into his career as a writer and his relationship with Cézanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.
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