Paul Cézanne paints the hill-town of Gardanne…

Paul Cézanne paints the hill-town of Gardanne (1886, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania) and The Bay of Estaque (1886, The Art Institute of Chicago).

Cézanne's boyhood friend Émile Zola has published the novel L'Oeuvre (1886, “The Masterpiece”), which depicts the life of an innovative painter who, unable to realize his creative potential, ends up hanging himself in front of his final painting.

While the novel irreparably damages Zola's friendship with all the major Impressionist painters, Cézanne in particular chooses to see the novel as a thinly disguised commentary on his own temperament and talent.

He breaks off his long friendship with the writer, as much because of neurotic distrust and jealousy as from disappointment at Zola's “popular” writing, which his antisocial and single-minded disposition finds incomprehensible.