As the author of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, Emile Zola enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century: but his essays on painting, and in particular his early championing of Manet, mark him out also as one of the most significant art critics of the age. Zola's Painters is the first book to explore the entirety of this body of work in its own right: some 150 texts written over thirty years. Robert Lethbridge, editor of the new Classiques Garnier edition of this corpus (two-thirds of which he unearthed himself from the newspapers in which they original appeared), now offers a radical reevaluation of Zola's writing on contemporary artists. The novelist's approval of the Impressionists, for example, must be seen in the light of an equal admiration for the Old Masters, which sits uneasily with Zola's modernist credentials as they are celebrated by posterity.

Robert Lethbridge is a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of London. He is currently Hon. Professor at the University of St Andrews.