I recall the long hours I sat for him... From time to time, as I posed, half-asleep, I looked at the artist standing at his easel, with features drawn, clear-eyed, engrossed in his work. He had forgotten me, he no longer knew I was there, he simply copied me, as if I were some kind of human beast, with a concentration and artistic integrity that I have seen nowhere else.

Zola's writings on Manet, the most important of which are presented in this volume, were the first to identify the painter's seminal role in the emergence of modern art.