Origin of “Luncheon”

  by Akira Kato

June 29, 2002

The above Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe) was painted in 1863 by Edouard Manet (exhibited at Musee d'Orsay; Oil on canvas, 81 x 101 cm).

The active spirit of independance in Impressionism—if not its style—may be considered to date from this famous work, refused by the Salon in 1863 and exhibited, under the title of Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés of the same year. It is the larger of Manet's two versions of the subject, a smaller and freer version being in the Courtauld Institute Gallery in London. According to Antonin Proust, the idea of the picture suggested itself to Manet when they were watching bathers at Argenteuil.

Manet was reminded of Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert (Concert Champêtre) and determined to repeat the theme in clearer colour and with modern personnel. A closer likeness of composition has been found in an engraving by Marcantonio of a group of river gods, after a now lost original by Raphael of The Judgement of Paris. An Old Master element of formal arrangement remains to distinguish it from an essentially Impressionist work and yet as well as being ostensibly set in the open there are various hints and suggestions in light and colour of fresh possibilities in open-air painting. The furious outcry it caused as the principal exhibit among the Salon rejects was based on the alleged indecency of two fully-dressed men appearing in the company of the naked female bather (an accusation no one had thought to make against the comparable juxtaposition in the work attributed to Giorgione).

But the respectable persons represented in sedate conversation were Manet’s favourite model, Victorine Meurend (whom he also painted as a toreador), his brother-in-law, Ferdinand Leenhoff, and Manet’s younger brother, Eugène.

Public hostility not only helped to make Manet a hero in the eyes of the young painters but brought together in his support the group from which the Impressionists emerged.

How far Claude Monet was impressed by the picture may be gauged from the fact that in 1865 he decided to paint his own Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, though simply as a group of picnickers without the element of dress and undress and in more natural attitudes than the figures in Manet's composition. Only a fragment of this large work has survived but a Déjeuner sur l'Herbe by Monet in the Hermitage, Leningrad, is apparently a replica---not so grand a work as Manet's but with more veracity of informal, sun-lit grouping. Manet himself changed the title of his painting to Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe at his exhibition of challenge and protest in 1867. It came to the Louvre as part of the Moreau-Nelaton Collection in 1906.

Giorgione left an indelible imprint in the world of painting with his work of “Pastoral Concert”, which affected the minds of even modern painters—let alone those of his contemporaries such as Titian.

Born in Castelfranco and christened as Giorgio Barbarelli, Giorgione studied under the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini, and later invigorated the Venetian school of painting. There remain no signed and dated works of his. Most scholars accept a small core of works as his, including the Castelfranco Altarpiece (1504, Castelfranco Veneto), Three Philosophers (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Tempest (Accademia, Venice). Other works are attributed to him on the basis of indirect evidence, although many of these attributions are still debated.

Most of Giorgione’s paintings consist of a figure or group of figures integrated in a broad surrounding landscape. Unlike earlier pictures in this mode, these works exhibit a new and highly lyrical use of light: The lighting is soft and hazy and is used to create mood rather than to define sharply the objects in the scene. He deliberately refused to make preparatory drawings, preferring instead to compose directly on the canvas; he felt that this led to a more atmospheric rendering and to more striking color effects.

Giorgione's innovations in subject matter were especially important in two areas: the landscape and the female nude. Prior to Giorgione, landscape scenes were taken from biblical, classical, or allegorical stories, but the Tempest appears to have no such source and stands on its own as a purely imaginative work. It gave birth to a revolution against the storytelling element in landscape painting and paved the way for later masters such as the French painter Claude Lorrain and the Dutch artist Rembrandt.

The Sleeping Venus (1510?, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany), attributed to Giorgione, pictures a reclining nude and is one of the first modern works of art in which the female figure is the principal and only subject of the picture. It inaugurated the nude in a landscape setting as one of the great themes of European art and led directly to the work of artists such as the Venetian painter Titian and the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.

Manet was also impressed by Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. His inspiration turned into Olympia. For more information, please visit From Sleeping Venus to Olympia.