Manet's Luncheon on the Grass scandalized Paris in 1863 because it showed a naked woman picnicking in a modern park beside two men in jackets, looking straight at the viewer. The jury of the Paris Salon rejected it, and the public laughed at it in a separate show for rejected works.
The canvas is huge, 207 by 265 centimeters. In a clearing, the two men talk while the woman sits without a stitch on, and behind them a second woman wades into a stream.
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Nudity alone cannot explain it. That same year, at that same Salon, the most admired picture on the walls was a nude, Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus. A pale goddess lay on the waves with her eyes half closed, and Napoleon III bought her for his own collection.
Émile Zola, who admired Manet, was not fooled. Years later he wrote that Cabanel's goddess resembled "a delicious courtesan" and was not made of flesh and blood. In his eyes, the emperor had bought a courtesan in a goddess's costume, while the jury threw out a woman in a park.
So what exactly did it refuse? I think the jury could forgive skin. What it could not forgive was a painter who did not bother to hide it behind a myth.
What did the crowds at the Salon des Refusés really laugh at?
At the subject first, but the harshest critics went after the painting itself. In 1863 the Salon jury turned away more than half of the roughly five thousand works submitted. Under great pressure, Napoleon III ordered an exhibition of the refused pictures, declaring that the public should judge for itself.
The Salon des Refusés opened on May 15, two weeks after the official Salon, in an annex of the same palace on the Champs-Élysées. On Sundays, as many as four thousand people came. Manet hung his picture there under the title Le Bain, The Bath.
The critic Louis Étienne described "a Bréda of some sort, as nude as possible, lolling boldly between two swells dressed to the teeth." Bréda was the name of a Paris neighborhood, and the word was a slur for the kept women who lived there.
Yet the harshest criticism went to Manet's drawing, his composition and his handling of paint, more than to the subject. The critic Castagnary called the technique "flabby." The musée d'Orsay records the charge that Manet had a mania for seeing in blocks, with abrupt contrasts of light and dark.
Cabanel's Venus had skin as smooth as porcelain. Manet's woman was lit hard and flat, with almost no shading, and that looked unfinished to eyes trained on the Academy. Yet the setup of the scene came straight from a painting in the Louvre.
What You'll Discover
What Manet borrowed from old masters.
Which figure is the wrong size.
What Manet first called it.
Who the woman really was.