It is often said of Zola that, with the possible exception of Baudelaire, no other nineteenth-century French writer enjoyed a closer or more extended relationship with the painters of his time. By virtue of timing, precisely, and in support of Zola's own modernist credentials, the biographical, critical and creative dimensions of that relationship are largely organised, in our cultural histories, around the Impressionists. This over-simplification relegates to the margins an engagement, on the writer's part, which finds expression in an early enthusiasm for Ary Scheffer and Bastien-Lepage and which ranges, in his work as an art critic over thirty years (either as points of reference or in more substantive reflection), from Ingres to Gustave Moreau. The privileged status of the avant-garde of the 1860s and 1870s, however, is certainly reinforced in the oft-cited remarks made by Zola himself shortly before his death in 1902: