Almuerzo sobre la hierba (estudio para el n.º 63)

In 1865 the 25-year-old Monet set out to answer Edouard Manet, whose own Luncheon on the Grass had scandalized Paris two years earlier with its picnicking men and a nude who stared straight back at the viewer. Monet's reply would be enormous and entirely modern: fashionable Parisians at lunch in the Fontainebleau forest, painted from life, all of them clothed. He never finished the giant canvas. Short of money, he left it with a landlord as security, and by the time he got it back it had rotted in a cellar, so he cut out the parts still worth keeping. This smaller version in Moscow preserves the whole composition that survives in Paris only as fragments: the picnic spread on the cloth, light dropping through the leaves onto the women's pale dresses.