Sacred Grove

At the Paris Salon of 1884 the picture everyone had an opinion about was The Sacred Grove by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a canvas more than ten metres wide, made for the main staircase of the museum in Lyon. Muses in pale robes rest in a calm, timeless landscape by a lake.

Straight after that Salon, the young men in the Paris studio of the painter Fernand Cormon answered it with this parody, close to four metres long and signed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was 19. Puvis's pale colours and gentle muses are all still here, with a few additions. A clock face has appeared on the classical portico, a kneeling boy in the corner is eating a loaf of bread, and from the right a column of men in dark city clothes and top hats marches into the grove. Lautrec put himself among them, seen from behind, relieving himself on the grass.