Lunch on the Grass

Cézanne's Lunch on the Grass at the Musée de l'Orangerie, painted around 1876, inevitably evokes Manet's scandalous 1863 canvas of the same subject — but Cézanne's version is entirely different in spirit. Rather than the social provocation of Manet's naked women among suited men, Cézanne's composition is a private, awkward arrangement of clothed figures in a landscape that reflects his uncertain, experimental approach to figure painting in the mid-1870s. He struggled throughout his career with the integration of figures into landscape, and this early attempt shows him working toward a solution he would not fully achieve until the Bathers series of the 1890s and 1900s.

The figures are painted with a somewhat heavier, more solid touch than the landscape elements surrounding them, creating a slight disjunction between human forms and setting that reflects the compositional challenge Cézanne was grappling with. The palette is darker and more muted than his later work.