The French artist, writer and collector Marcellin Desboutin is best remembered today as a printmaker and as a friend and associate of the Impressionists; famously, he modelled the male figure in Degas’s painting L’absinthe (1875-76, Musée d’Orsay). With one exception, his prints date from 1872 (from which date, having exhausted an inheritance, he was forced to earn his living as a printmaker) or later. The majority of his prints consist of portraits of contemporary artists and writers.

This portrait of the Naturalist novelist and critic Émile Zola is part of a series published in 1879. It is the last of four portrait prints Desboutin made of him, which together testify to the friendship between the two men (Zola was one of his key advocates and wrote the preface to the catalogue of Desboutin’s one-man show in 1889). It is a proof before letters, signed by Desboutin; the print was later published with Zola’s facsimile signature and the publication line of Cadart (‘Vve A. Cadart’), one of the leading drivers of the Etching Revival in France. Zola is depicted in a classical thinker’s or philosopher’s pose, his forehead resting on his hand, although his eyes, rather than being lowered, are open and gazing upward through his spectacles, as if to suggest his unflagging engagement with the world around him.

Provenance : Eric G. Carlson, New York, by whom given to Donato Esposito in 2013

Inscription: M.Desboutin

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