A partida de croqué

In 1873 Manet set up outdoors and painted in natural light for the first time, working close to the young Impressionists he knew but never quite joined. The subject is casual, a game of croquet on a summer lawn, a fashionable pastime of the moment. The relaxed couples, though, are a quiet joke on the viewer. The woman leaning on her mallet is Victorine Meurent, Manet's favourite model, and the others are fellow painters and their models rather than the respectable bourgeois pairs they resemble. The brushwork looks quick and spontaneous, yet the arrangement of figures across the grass is carefully worked out. Manet had painted a first croquet picture two years earlier, on the beach at Boulogne.