Déjeuner sur l’herbe

Rolf Læssøe attributes some of the unnaturalness in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe to a desire to engage the viewer:

“It’s an engulfing painting. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is a programmatic painting, and paradigmatic of the ways in which Manet engaged the viewer in his works through gazes, spillings, reliefs, enigmas and so on. Here, it isn’t only the gaze of the seated nude that engages the viewer, and implicates him in the scene. The very fact that the three main protagonists exude an air, and different signs of, indoor and studio ‘behavior’ (such as a hat and unabashed nudity) puts them on a par with the painting’s beholder, who – naturally – also finds him – or herself in an interior, and an artistic interior at that (a museum, as it is, or a private collection, as it might have been), echoing the studio atmosphere of the group of three. In this way, we enter the painting, and become part of it ourselves. Inside the painting, the ‘painter-pointer’ bridges the spaces of the ‘painting-within-a-painting’ and the primary scene; this latter, in turn, provides bridges between its own space and that of the beholder, most famously, of course, in the direct gaze of the nude, but almost just as poignantly in the cornucopious still life with delicious fruit, ready for the taking.”

Rolf Læssøe, ”Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as a Veiled Allegory of Painting,” Artibus et Historiae, vol. 26, no. 51 (2005): 214.

Similar Subjects by Other Artists

Francisco Goya, A Picnic, 1785-90 (National Gallery, London)

Claude Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865-66 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow)

Pál Szinyei Merse, Picnic in May, 1873 (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest)

Paul Ranson, The Bath, 1906 (Musée d'Orsay)

Web Resources:

smarthistory: Dejeuner sur l’herbe