Luncheon on the Grass

Manet submitted Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe to the 1863 Salon, where it was rejected and instead shown at the Salon des Refusés alongside hundreds of other official rejects. The scandal centred not on nudity per se — the Salon routinely accepted mythological nudes — but on the contemporary setting: the nude woman picnics with two clothed modern men identifiable as Parisian students, making the implied transaction impossible to ignore. Manet based the composition on Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris, transplanting Renaissance formal authority into a scene of bourgeois leisure that outraged its audience precisely because it was too legible.

Manet's notorious suppression of tonal gradients — the nude rendered in flat, uniform light against the dark foliage — strips away the atmospheric recession that would have made the scene conventionally picturesque. The shallow picture space, characteristic of his engagement with Japanese prints and Velázquez, compresses the three background registers into an almost decorative arrangement.