Manette Salomon Reading Order

Manette Salomon (1867) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is the definitive nineteenth-century French novel of the artist's life — a study of a group of painters in the Paris studios of the 1840s and 1850s, and of the career of the most talented among them, Coriolis, whose art is progressively destroyed by his love for and dependence on the model Manette Salomon. The novel belongs to the Goncourts' systematic project of writing about underrepresented social worlds with the same analytic precision that Balzac had brought to the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy: where La Fille Élisa (1877) would do the same for the prison world and Germinie Lacerteux (1864) for the servant class, Manette Salomon does it for the painter's studio. The novel is also the founding document of the antisemitic stereotyping of the Jewish woman as a destructive force on artistic male creativity — Manette is the Jewish model whose influence on Coriolis is presented as the reason for his artistic decline — and its reception history is inseparable from this aspect of its content. As a novel of artistic milieu, however, Manette Salomon is extraordinarily precise: the Barbizon school of landscape painters, the academic tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts, the debates between Romanticism and Realism that preceded Impressionism, and the social economy of the atelier are all documented with the Goncourts' characteristic mixture of aesthetic sensitivity and sociological precision.