O Almoço sobre a Erva

In 1863 the official Paris Salon rejected so many pictures that the emperor, Napoleon the Third, ordered a second show for the refused ones, and it was there that Manet hung this. It became the thing everyone came to laugh at. Two men in the dark suits of the day sit talking in a wood, and beside them a woman sits completely naked, having lunch, looking not at them but straight out at you. That direct, unbothered gaze was the real offence. Paris was used to nudes, but they were supposed to be goddesses or nymphs, safely set in myth. Manet took the arrangement of the figures from an old engraving after Raphael and a Titian in the Louvre, then dressed the men in modern clothes and made the woman an ordinary Parisian, and that collision of a respectable past with a present-day picnic was what scandalised people. He also refused the smooth shading viewers expected, laying light and dark side by side in flat patches, so critics complained the figures looked cut out and pasted down. That flatness, jeered at then, is part of why later painters treated him as a beginning. Behind the group a second woman bathes in a stream, too large for where she stands, the space deliberately not quite adding up.