While reading and writing about the Impressionists, I realized that the life and personality of Claude Monet, the most popular artist of all time, remain largely unknown. He seems to have vanished into his pictures. Yet he lives on in two great novels: his friend Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre) and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Zola and Proust bring him out of the shadows and illuminate his life and genius.

Zola’s The Masterpiece (1886) is—with Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831), James’s “The Madonna of the Future” (1873), and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)—one of the greatest portraits of the artist in nineteenth-century fiction. Zola said that his doomed hero, Claude Lantier, a failed artist, was based on several painters, “un Manet, un Cézanne dramatisé, plus près de Cézanne,” as well as on Monet and Zola himself, and that he would “have to press his friends into service, to collect their most salient features.” What aspects of the novel, I wondered, were based on Monet?

Robert Niess, in his book-length study of the novel, states: “It does not seem that Monet could have been Zola’s chief source for the character of Claude Lantier.” Zola based Lantier’s Provençal origins, childhood friendship, and saturnine personality on Cézanne, and his unfinished masterpiece on Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe(1863). We think of Monet as prosperous and admired, yet when Zola published his novel, the middle-aged artist was still impoverished and striving for fame. Zola clearly