L'Œuvre is a fictional account of Zola's friendship with Paul Cézanne and a fairly accurate portrayal of the Parisian art world in the mid 19th century.

Like Cézanne, Claude Lantier is a revolutionary artist whose work is misunderstood by an art-going public hidebound by traditional subjects, techniques and representations.

Like Zola, Sandoz contemplates a series of novels about a family based in science and incorporating modern people and everyday lives.

Dubuche is not half as bold as Claude and he chooses a more conventional course, opting for the security of a middle-class life and a bourgeois marriage.

(Zola deliberately invokes Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet, which provoked outcries at the actual Salon des Refusés in 1863.)

Claude has three paintings in three years rejected by the Salon before a spectacular view of the Île de la Cité captures his imagination.

He begins adding incongruous elements (like a female nude bather), reworks and repaints until the whole enterprise collapses into disaster, then starts over.

The slow breakup of his circle of friends contributes to his decaying mental state, as does the success of one of his confreres, a lesser talent who has co-opted the 'Open Air' school and made it a critical and financial triumph.

The only ones of his old friends who attend his funeral are Sandoz and Bongrand, an elder statesman of the artistic community who recognized and helped nurture Claude's genius.

1842, the son of Gervaise Macquart and Auguste Lantier) is first introduced briefly as a child in La fortune des Rougon.

As a young journalist, Zola wrote many articles on art and he was deeply interested in the newest ways of painting; he was one of the earliest champions of the work of Édouard Manet.

The character of Sandoz, a young writer whose ambition is to write a story of a family that would portray the present epoch, is most clearly a self-portrait of the author.

In a letter written after the novel's appearance in 1886, Claude Monet (who was acquainted with Cézanne and Manet) indicated that he did not recognize himself or any of his fellow painters in the character.