Edouard Manet
(1832-83) was one of the group of painters who came to be known as
“Impressionists”, although the painting in question was one that preceded the
use of that term by nearly a decade.
Manet’s
artistic education was conventional enough, including instruction from the
accomplished French artist Thomas Couture and many hours spent studying and
copying the works of the masters, both old and more recent. However, he came to
appreciate that a new approach was needed in which the portrayal of Nature was
combined with the artist’s feelings towards it. He came closest to finding this
in the works of Velazquez and Goya.
His main
motivation was the observation that “there are no lines in Nature”, so he
abandoned outline as his starting point and modelled his images by the subtle
gradation of tints that fused into each other. For him, light was the essential
element in a painting, once saying that: “The principal person in a picture is
the light”.
Needless to
say, Manet’s ideas did not find favour with the artistic establishment, and he
was one of the artists who was rejected by the Paris Salon in 1863 and
exhibited instead in the “Salon des Refusés” (the Salon of the Rejected) at the
invitation of Emperor Napoleon III.
However, the
painting that Manet exhibited caused a scandal and even the Emperor called it
“an affront to modesty”. This was “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” (“Lunch on the
Grass”). It shows four people in a woodland setting. In the background a woman
bathes in a pool, and in the foreground are items belonging to a picnic, namely
fruit, bread rolls and a flask. It looks as though the three main characters
have finished eating and are instead engaged in conversation. Two men sit or
half-lie on the ground. The one to the right, propped on one elbow, gestures at
his companions as though stressing a point at issue. The man to the left might
or might or not be listening, but he is not what we see when we first look at
the painting, because the woman companion, who looks straight at us and ignores
the two men, is naked.
Nudity in art
is not a problem to most people, and certainly was not so to 1860s Parisians.
However, they were used to seeing nude goddesses in mythical scenes or as
studio portraits. What appalled them was the portrayal of a naked woman in the
company of two fully-clothed men in a scene that was so ordinary. Even the
picnic is ordinary, with food that every Parisian would recognise as their
staple diet. There had to be a story here that involved immorality, and the
artist became a figure of suspicion in terms of his own moral rectitude, as a
result.
However, that
was not something that bothered Manet, because he simply sought the freedom to
paint what he wanted without any constraints imposed on him by others. If, by
so doing, others were shocked by the results, that was their problem, not his.
The mistake
that observers make with this painting is to expect it to tell a story when
there is none to be told. This is not a photographic representation of an
actual scene but a set of impressions of reality as conceived by the artist.
The characters portrayed never sat in the woods together, posing while Manet
stood at his easel; their combination only had reality within Manet’s
imagination. This is a studio work, not a landscape with figures.
The three
main characters were real people whom Manet knew well. The two men are Manet’s
brother Eugène and a Dutch sculptor named Ferdinand Leenhoff who was also
Manet’s wife’s brother. The naked woman is, in part, Victorine Meurent, a model
who regularly posed for Manet and other artists. However, only the face is
hers, with the body being that of Manet’s wife Suzanne, who had a fuller figure
than Victorine. This is therefore a combination, or collage, of portraits, plus
a still life in the foreground and a woodland scene that contrasts light and
shade. The woman is naked because that is what Manet needed for the
composition, and that is also the reason why the bathing woman is too large for
her apparent distance behind the other figures.
The painting
is also a study in the use of light, which was so important for Manet. The
woman’s expanse of white skin, seen from the side, catches the light, as does
the light clothing of the crouched woman in the background. The eye is taken
diagonally across the canvas from the light colours of the picnic, through the
two women, to the sunlight catching the trees and grass in the distance. On
either side of this diagonal there is mainly darkness, both in the framing
trees and the dark jackets worn by the two men.
Manet made a
bold statement with “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” which was not appreciated by many
people at the time. Manet was not a true “Impressionist”, although he was good
friends with a number of artists to whom that label belongs more accurately.
However, his work did mark an important turning point in the history of art.
The original
painting can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
© John
Welford
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