Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe

A dozen years earlier, Manet had scandalised Paris with a picnic scene of a nude woman calmly seated among clothed men, and here Cézanne takes up that same idea and makes it stranger and more private. His figures sit in a wooded clearing that feels less like a real outing than a memory or a dream, perhaps of the countryside around Aix-en-Provence where he grew up. The clothed woman rests her chin in her hand, echoing Manet's pose, and the bearded man meant to be Cézanne himself sits nearby. The arrangement owes something to Poussin, whose paintings he studied and copied in the Louvre. It is a tiny canvas, barely larger than a sheet of paper, and it is not even certain that the title on it is Cézanne's own.