Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, known to English-speakers as The Luncheon on the Grass, is a 81.9 x 104.1 in (208 by 264.5 cm) oil painting by father of Impressionism Édouard Manet. Originally titled Le Bain (The Bath), Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe depicts two men and two women at what remains of a picnic out in the open. The men are fully clothed, while one woman faces the viewer, having stripped down to nothing, while the other woman is scantily clad in the pond in the background.
See also Olympia, another Manet painting which was criticised for its nudity.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe provides examples of:
- Art Imitates Art: Manet had a deep understanding of art history, having based the painting on Judgement of Paris (ca. 1515) by Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael, Pastoral Concert by Giorgione or Titian, The Tempest by Giorgione and La Partie Carrée by Antoine Watteau.
- Color Contrast: The forest scenery is painted in dark greens and browns, with the exception of the pond and the two men wear black suit jackets. By contrast, the picnic implements are painted in comparatively saturated hues (blue, orange, and light beige), while the two women are naked and white-skinned. This helps draw the eye to the aforementioned elements.
- Dining in the Buff: Depicts one of the women enjoying the picnic completely naked. It's meant to elicit a jarring contrast because the other characters are clothed (even if the other woman's naked body can be appreciated under her soaked dress). Apparently, this lady is a nudist.
- Impressionism: It captures a Slice of Life scene — the characters are merely having a picnic. It also disrupts two Elements of art: the scenery's textures are left purposefully in poor detail and the perspective (aka, space) is wrong, giving the impression of an absence of separation between the forefront and the background.
- It's Not Porn, It's Art: This painting was met with outrage from critics for placing nude women in an everyday setting. Back then, nudity was okay as long as they were goddesses, nymphs, sprites, etc. However, real women being nude in artworks was a big no-no (with the possible exception of paintings depicting nude models posing, such as a Reclining Venus). Manet's response to them was this trope.
- Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty: Downplayed. The men are fully clothed in Parisian fashion. One of the women is wearing a white dress that is made transparent due to her time in the water, while the other is completely naked, the blue dress and hat beside her implying that she had stripped where they had laid out their picnic.
- Nipple and Dimed: The nipples of the woman in the foreground are completely covered by her arm and the shadow it casts. They don't cover her sideboobs, though.
- Our Nudity Is Different: In a case of Your Normal Is Our Taboo, one of the reasons behind the painting's controversy is due to the figures in the painting were modern, the clothed figures wearing fashionable Parisian hinting at the painting being set in modern times. At the time, nude men and women depicted in paintings were normally goddesses and other mythical figures (see William-Adolphe Bouguereau's art for instance), so the fact that the nude woman is a regular human without the pretense of myth and time was considered scandalous for its day. Others followed in that trend, such as Gustave Courbet with L'Origine du monde.
- Stylistic Suck: While much of the composition of the painting could be considered amateur, what makes it different is that Manet purposefully made these errors.
- The woman in the pond is too large for how far away the painting implies her to be, with her thumb lining up with the man on the right's thumb to collapse the illusion of depth.
- The nude woman is depicted with an absence of contrast you would see from nudes in other paintings, with critics commenting that the lighting looks as though it was done in a studio. What few shadows there are depicts them as stark compared to her light skin, the shadows almost outlining her figure.
- While the figures have impressive attention to detail, the grass and other details in the background looked loose and unfinished, something that would later define other Impressionist painters.
- Take That!: The whole piece is Manet's artistic middle finger to the Salon, a long-running annual French exhibition that defined art at the time by virtue of
"If the Salon rejects it, it's not art". The painting tightly follows all of the technical aspects of the style that the Salon endorsed, while blatantly mocking the Strictly Formula themes and subjects the juries traditionally favored, and parodying the quirks of pieces venerated as flawless. - Vapor Wear: The woman in the background is completely soaked, which causes her white dress to be partially transparent. This reveals that she's not wearing any sort of underwear.
- The X of Y: The title is fashioned this way.
