The Art of the Con

Émile Zola’s 1886 novel L’Oeuvre follows the doomed career of the painter Claude Lantier, the most talented of a band of rebellious young artists in 1860s Paris. A rough composite of Manet and Cézanne, Lantier exhibits his manifesto-like painting Plein Air, modeled on Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, where it is roundly mocked:
Some young fellows went into contortions, as if somebody had been tickling them. One lady