Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (English: The Luncheon on the Grass) – originally titled Le Bain (The Bath) – is a large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863. The painting depicts a female nude and a scantily dressed female bather on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. Rejected by the Salon jury of 1863, Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit this and two other paintings in the 1863 Salon des Refusés where the painting sparked public notoriety and controversy. The piece is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A smaller, earlier version can be seen at the Courtauld Gallery, London.
The painting features a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men. Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men, dressed as young dandies, seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman's clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth – giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio. This impression is reinforced by the use of broad "photographic" light, which casts almost no shadows. The man on the right wears a flat hat with a tassel, of a kind normally worn indoors.
Despite the mundane subject, Manet deliberately chose a large canvas size, measuring 208 x 264 cm, normally reserved for historical, religious, and mythological subjects. The style of the painting breaks with the academic traditions of the time. He did not try to hide the brush strokes; the painting even looks unfinished in some parts of the scene. The nude is also starkly different from the smooth, flawless figures of Cabanel or Ingres.
A nude woman casually lunching with fully dressed men was an affront to audiences' sense of propriety, though Émile Zola, a contemporary of Manet's, argued that this was not uncommon in paintings found in the Louvre; he also felt that such a reaction came from viewing art differently than "analytic" painters like Manet, who use a painting's subject as a pretext to paint.There is much that we still do not know about the painting such as when he actually began painting it, exactly how he got the idea, and how and what sort of preparation works he did. Though Manet had claimed this piece was once valued at 25,000 Francs in 1871, it actually remained in his possession until 1878 when Jules Faure, opera-singer and collector, bought it for just 2,600 Francs.
The figures of this painting are a testament to how deeply connected Manet was to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Some assume that the landscape of the painting is meant to be Ile Saint-Oeuen, which was just up the Seine from Gennevilliers, where his family property was. Manet often used real models and people he knew as reference during his creation process. The female nude is clearly thought to be Victorine Meurent, the woman who became his favorite and frequently portrayed model, that later was the subject of Olympia. The male figure on the right was based on a combination of his two brothers, Eugène and Gustave Manet. The other man is based on his brother-in-law and Dutch sculptor named Ferdinand Leenhoff. Nancy Locke referred to this scene as Manet’s family portrait.
What many critics find shocking about this painting is the interaction, or lack thereof, between the three main subjects in the foreground and the woman bathing in the background. There are many contrasting qualities to the painting that juxtapose and distance the female nude from the other two male subjects. For example, the feminine versus the masculine, the naked versus the clothed, and the white color palette versus the dark color palette creates a clear social difference between the men and the woman. Additionally, viewers are intrigued by the questions raised by the gaze of the nude woman. It is indeterminable whether she is challenging or accepting the viewer, looking past the viewer, engaging the viewer, or even looking at the viewer at all. This encounter identifies the gaze as a figure of the painting itself, as well as the figure object of the woman’s gaze.
The Luncheon on the Grass is the greatest work of Édouard Manet, one in which he realizes the dream of all painters: to place figures of natural grandeur in a landscape. We know the power with which he vanquished this difficulty. There are some leaves, some tree trunks, and, in the background, a river in which a chemise-wearing woman bathes; in the foreground, two young men are seated across from a second woman who has just exited the water and who dries her naked skin in the open air. This nude woman has scandalized the public, who see only her in the canvas. My God! What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men! That has never been seen. And this belief is a gross error, for in the Louvre there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude. But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized. The crowd has kept itself moreover from judging The Luncheon on the Grass like a veritable work of art should be judged; they see in it only some people who are having a picnic, finishing bathing, and they believed that the artist had placed an obscene intent in the disposition of the subject, while the artist had simply sought to obtain vibrant oppositions and a straightforward audience. Painters, especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not have this preoccupation with the subject which torments the crowd above all; the subject, for them, is merely a pretext to paint, while for the crowd, the subject alone exists. Thus, assuredly, the nude woman of The Luncheon on the Grass is only there to furnish the artist the occasion to paint a bit of flesh. That which must be seen in the painting is not a luncheon on the grass; it is the entire landscape, with its vigors and its finesses, with its foregrounds so large, so solid, and its backgrounds of a light delicateness; it is this firm modeled flesh under great spots of light, these tissues supple and strong, and particularly this delicious silhouette of a woman wearing a chemise who makes, in the background, an adorable dapple of white in the milieu of green leaves. It is, in short, this vast ensemble, full of atmosphere, this corner of nature rendered with a simplicity so just, all of this admirable page in which an artist has placed all the particular and rare elements which are in him."
Picasso's Luncheon on the Grass
For more than two years, from August, 1959, to September, 1961, Picasso worked on this series of paintings, which consists of twenty-seven paintings and many drawings. Once again he found an opportunity to take up a number of his favorite themes.
Manet's composition, showing two nudes with two clothed men in a landscape, is itself a kind of variation. Almost exactly 100 years before Picasso treated this theme, Manet, building on a theme taken from an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, attempted to translate Giorgione's Concert champetre (in The Louvre) into a contemporary idiom. The Arcadian figures in the work of the great Venetian painter were transformed by Manet into Parisians of his own day, and Arcadia itself took on a new, contemporary form just outside the gates of Paris.
Picasso's variations are of an entirely different kind: he takes Manet's composition as a sort of springboard for his own imagination, which carries him into new, as yet unsuspected directions.
In the course of this work we find Picasso often straying far from his starting point, then coming back to it again, and inventing ever new variations on the theme. To Picasso, Manet's painting - like anything in art or nature - is a theme.
In the painting below (it is the last of one series of variations) Picasso retransforms the model into an Arcadian scene: instead of juxtaposing nude and clothed figures, we have here an idyl with four nude figures, shown near a pond in the subdued green light of the foliage. This brings to mind the themes of the Bather, and Figures on the Beach, which turn up so often in Picasso's works. But, via Manet, a new background has been added to these themes - the dimension of mythology - and the link with nineteenth-century painting has deepened the relationship between the figures, endowing them with greater tension and thus bringing them closer to the spirit of our own days.
Picasso repeatedly felt tempted to match himself against the old masters. He was conscious of his equality with them, and this feeling gave him the freedom to make whatever use of the old masterpieces he cared to. These paintings show his magnificent ability to transform things and forms alike into new signs, which disclose a new meaning, and in which the image of our time is recorded for posterity.
