LOOKING AT MANET

"I recall the long hours I sat for him... From time to time, as I posed, half-asleep, I looked at the artist standing at his easel, with features drawn, clear-eyed, engrossed in his work. He had forgotten me, he no longer knew I was there, he simply copied me, as if I were some kind of human beast, with a concentration and artistic integrity that I have seen nowhere else."

Zola s writings on Manet, the most important of which are presented in this volume, were the first to identify the painter s seminal role in the emergence of modern art.