(; 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.
It depicts a nude woman and a scantily dressed bathing woman 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,Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, gravure, lithographie et architecture : refusés par le Jury de 1863 et exposés, par décision de S.M. l'Empereur au salon annexe, palais des Champs-Elysées, le 15 mai 1863, Édouard Manet, Le Bain, no. 363, Bibliothèque nationale de France where the painting sparked public notoriety and controversy. The work increased Manet's fame; in spite of this it failed to sell at its debut.
The work is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A smaller, earlier version can be seen at the Courtauld Gallery, London.
Description and context 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, sit with her. 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, out of scale in comparison with the figures in the foreground, a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Both the woman and the trees in the background are also painted in a rougher style than the crisp figures in the foreground. The man on the right wears a flat hat with a tassel, a kind normally worn indoors.
Despite the mundane subject, Manet deliberately chose a large canvas size, measuring 81.9 × 104.1 in (208 by 264.5 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. Zola also felt that such a reaction came from viewing art differently from the perspective of "analytic" painters like Manet, who use a painting's subject as a pretext to paint.
There is much not known about the painting, such as when Manet actually began painting it, how he got the idea and how and what sort of preparatory works he did. Though Manet had claimed this piece was once valued at 25,000 francs in 1871, it remained in his possession until 1878 when Jean-Baptiste Faure, opera singer and collector, bought it for 2,600 francs.
Figures in the painting The figures of this painting are a testament to how deeply connected Manet was to . Some assume that the landscape of the painting is meant to be l'Île Saint-Ouen, which was just up the Seine from his family property in Gennevilliers. Manet often used real models and people he knew as reference during his creation process. The nude woman is thought to be Victorine Meurent, the woman who became his favorite and frequently portrayed model, who 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, Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff. Nancy Locke referred to this scene as Manet's family portrait.
Interactions of the figures 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, some 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.
Inspirations As with the later Olympia (1863) and other works, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Judgment of Paris () after a drawing by Raphael.Ross King. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. New York: Waller & Company, 2006 . Raphael was an artist revered by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and his paintings were part of the teaching programme at the École des Beaux-Arts, where copies of fifty-two images from his most celebrated frescoes were permanently on display. Le Bain (an early title for ) was therefore, in many ways, a defiant painting.
A further, more specifically compositional reference was identified by the art historian Gustav Pauli in 1908: Pauli demonstrated the persistence within the painting of the figural schema of the Judgement of Paris by Raphael, a lost work known through an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. This model, in turn, ultimately derives from antiquity, in particular from two Roman sarcophagi of the second century AD, preserved respectively at Villa Medici and Villa Doria Pamphilj. The poses of the three foreground figures closely correspond to those of the seated figures which, in the ancient reliefs and in the Renaissance engraving, attend the mythological scene. This network of citations demonstrates how Manet – the radical innovator – actually operates though a sophisticated reactivation of the classical tradition. Such a perspective finds resonance in the brilliant formulation by Aby Warburg, who described the artist as a "faithful steward of tradition", capable of receiving and productively reinvesting the legacy of antiquity, transforming inherited models within a fully modern pictorial language.
Scholars also cite two works as important precedents for Manet's painting : The Pastoral Concert by Giorgione or possibly Titian (in the Louvre) and Giorgione's The Tempest, both of which are famous Renaissance paintings. The Tempest, which also features a fully dressed man and a nude woman in a rural setting, offers an important precedent for Manet's painting .John Rewald,The History of Impressionism, The Museum of Modern Art, 4th revised edition 1973, (1st 1946, 2nd 1955, 3rd 1961), p. 85. . Pastoral Concert even more closely resembles Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, as it features two dressed men seated in a rural setting, with two undressed women. Pastoral Concert is in the collection of the Louvre in Paris and is likely, therefore, to have been studied by Manet.
According to Antonin Proust, he and Manet had been lounging by the Seine as they spotted a woman bathing in the river. This prompted Manet to say, "I copied Giorgione's women, the women with musicians. It's black, that painting. The ground has come through. I want to redo it and do it with a transparent atmosphere with people like those we see over there."
There may be a connection between and the work of Antoine Watteau. Manet's original title, Le Bain, initially drew the main attention to the woman near the water. This bathing figure alone is quite similar to the figure in Watteau's La Villageoise, as both women crouch or lean over near water, simultaneously holding up their skirts. It is possible that Manet adapted this pose, which is more clearly seen in a sketch of his, years before his creation of .
Criticism There were many mixed reviews and responses to when it was first displayedFernand Desnoyers, La peinture en 1863 : Salon des refusés, A. Dutil (Paris) 1863, Bibliothèque nationale de France (in French) and it continues to yield a variety of responses. The initial response was characterized by its blunt rejection from the Paris Salon and subsequent display in the Salon des Refusés. Though many critiques were rooted in confusion about the piece, they were not always completely negative. Odilon Redon, for example, did not like it. There is a discussion of it, from this point of view, in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Le Capitaine Pompilius, a contributor for Le Petit Journal, thought the characteristically "male" colors of the piece brought the countryside into the salon, but thought the painting was underdeveloped. Castagnary, appreciator of realist works, identified it as a nice sketch but said it lacked sincerity and lost the definition of the anatomy of the subjects. He also described Manet's painting technique as "flabby". Arthur Stevens, contributor for Le Figaro, praised Manet as a talented colorist but felt that he neglected form and modeling in this piece. Thoré, Paul, and Louvet loved the energy of the colors but found the brush strokes to be uneven.
One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution present at that time in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western outskirts of Paris. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting.Peter J. Gartner, Art and Architecture: Musée d'Orsay, 2001, p. 180. .
Criticism of the subject matter Louis Étienne characterized the painting as a puzzle, while describing the nude female as "a Bréda of some sort, as nude as possible, lolling boldly between two swells dressed to the teeth. These two persons look like high school students on holiday, committing a great sin to prove their manhood."Louis Étienne, Le jury et les exposants: salon des refusés, Paris, 1863, p. 30., Bibliothèque nationale de France Arthur Stevens could not understand what the painting was saying. Didier de Montchaux found the subject to be "fairly scabrous". Thoré described the nude as an ugly and risqué subject matter, while describing the male on the right as one "who doesn't even think of taking off his horrible padded hat outdoors ... It's the contrast between such an antipathetic animal to the character of a pastoral scene, and this undraped bather, that is shocking." Philip Hamerton, an English painter and contributor at the Fine Arts Quarterly, had an affinity for the characteristic photographic detail of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Though he did recognize the inspiration from Giorgione, he found Manet's modern realism to be offensive in this situation. His disapproval of Manet and similar artists was related to the idea of indecency behind "vulgar men" painting nude women.
Though the peculiarity of the combination of one female nude with three clothed figures sparked mixed responses, the lack of interaction of the figures in addition to the lack of engagement by the nude woman provoked laughter instead of offense. Anne McCauley claimed that laughter as a response represses the sexual tension and makes the scene rather unthreatening to the viewer in the end.
Commentary of Émile Zola