Luncheon on the Grass – Manet 1000-Piece Puzzle

The Luncheon on the Grass is a large oil-on-canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863. It depicts a scantily clad female nude at a picnic with two fully clothed men in a rural setting.
Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit this and two other paintings at the Salon des Refusés of 1863, where the painting aroused both notoriety and public controversy. The work is now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A smaller, earlier version can be seen at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

The inspiration is therefore classical and, consequently, what disturbs the public so much lies not in the subject but in its actualization, as had already happened, just six years earlier, with Courbet’s Young Girls on the Banks of the Seine.

The scene, set in a grassy clearing in a grove, depicts a nude woman in the foreground, painted by Victorine-Louise Meurent (1844–1927), the artist’s favorite model. A man sits next to her, while the second male figure is semi-reclining facing them, with one arm outstretched toward the young woman.

A second girl is washing herself in the waters of a distant body of water. The four figures are arranged in an ideal triangle, one of whose vertices falls on the straw hat and blue dress in the lower left corner, which, along with the overturned fruit basket, form a true still life within the painting itself.

Visiting the Salon de Refuses, Émile Zola, a friend and admirer of Manet, wrote with great irony:

From every side, the heavy breathing of corpulent gentlemen and the hoarse hissing of lanky gentlemen could be heard, and above all, the silly flute-like giggles of women dominated. On the opposite side of the room, a group of young men writhed with laughter, and a woman had collapsed on a bench, her knees drawn together, panting and struggling to breathe, her face hidden in her handkerchief.