Prints and Authors in the Time of Manet

My Salon (Mon salon)

Book with letterpress text
Published by Librairie central, Paris, 1866
Gift of Molly and Walter Bareiss, 1984.492

Émile Zola was an advocate of Naturalism, a literature based on observable behaviors; and he believed Naturalism to be analogous to the Realism practiced by the emerging visual artists of the day. Just as Édouard Manet based his art on the life about him, Zola strove to show how society, heredity, and environment combined to create behavior.
Mon salon, is a review of the 1866 Paris Salon—the official juried exhibition and competition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts)—containing a tribute to Zola’s boyhood friend the painter Paul Cézanne and a section devoted to Manet.