Luncheon on the Grass
Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883) · 1863
Two men in fashionable modern dress sit on the grass in a wood, deep in conversation, while a naked woman sits beside them and looks calmly out at us. Behind them a second woman in a shift bathes in a stream. In the foreground the picnic has been tipped out of its basket: bread, fruit and the woman's discarded blue dress. Nothing here is mythological or ancient, which is exactly what shocked Paris in 1863. The men are Manet's brother and his future brother-in-law, the woman is again Victorine Meurent, and the scene reads as a contemporary outing with no excuse attached.
Manet took the arrangement of figures from a Renaissance engraving after Raphael, and the idea of a nude woman among clothed men from a painting by Titian or Giorgione in the Louvre. What he did with it was new. The figures are lit flatly from the front, with none of the soft gradations of Academic painting, and the woman's body is startlingly pale against the dark coats. The landscape is loose and sketchy, and the scale is odd: the bathing woman would be a giant if she stood up. Manet did not care. He wanted the picture to be judged as paint, colour and confrontation rather than as a window on to a believable world.
Rejected by the official Salon, the painting was shown in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of rejected works that the Emperor allowed as a curiosity. Crowds came to laugh at it. Its scandal made Manet the reluctant leader of the young painters who would become the Impressionists, and Monet later began a huge picnic painting of his own in response. The work passed from a collector to the state in 1906 and hangs now with Olympia, its companion in notoriety. Look for the small frog in the lower left corner, and the bullfinch flying above the bathers, two of Manet's quiet jokes.
Did You Know? The painting's original title was simply Le Bain, The Bath; the name it carries now was adopted only later.
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