MASTERPIECES OF WESTERN PAINTING

MANET’S
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
EDITED RY

PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Edouard Manet’s controversial painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is one
of the best-known images in French art. The subject of critical analysis
for more than a century, it still defies singular interpretations. This book
offers six different readings of the painting. Based on new ideas about
its context, production, meaning, and reception, these essays, written
specially for this volume by leading scholars of French modern art,
incorporate close examinations of the picture’s radical style and novel
subject, relevant historical developments, and archival material, as well
as biographical evidence that prompts psychological inquiries. Shedding
new light on the artist and the touchstone work of modernism, Manet’s
“Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” also introduces readers to current
methodologies in art history and to the multiple ways that this complex
painting can be framed.
MASTERPIECES OF WESTERN PAINTINGS

This series serves as a forum for the reassessment of important paintings in the
Western tradition that span a period from the Renaissance to the twentieth
century. Each volume focuses on a single work and includes an introduction
outlining its general history, as well as a selection of essays that examine the
work from a variety of methodological perspectives. Demonstrating how and
why these paintings have such enduring value, the volumes also offer new
insights into their meaning for contemporaries and their subsequent reception.

VOLUMES IN THE SERIES

Masaccio’s “Trinity,” edited by Rona Goffen, Rutgers University
Raphael’s “School of Athens,” edited by Marcia Hall, Temple
University Titian’s “ Venus of Urbino,” edited by Rona Goffen, Rutgers
University Caravaggio’s “Saint Paul,” edited by Gail Feigenbaum
Rembrandt’s “Bathsheba with David’s Letter,” edited by Ann Jensen
Adams, University of California, Santa Barbara
David's “Death of Marat,” edited by Will Vaughn and Helen Weston,
University College, University of London
Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” edited by Paul Hayes Tucker,
University of Massachusetts Boston
Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” edited by Christopher Green,
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
MANET’S
LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

Edited by

Paul Hayes Tucker

WW CAMBRIDGE
MM UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building,Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 iRP, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 40 West 20th
Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
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© Cambridge University Press 1998

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge Univesity Press.

First published 1998

Printed in the United States of America

Typeset in Bembo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe / edited by Paul Hayes Tucker, p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-521-47466-3 (hardback: alk. paper). - ISBN 0-521-47984-3
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Manet, Edouard,. 1832-1883. Luncheon on the grass. 2. Manet, Edouard,
1832-1883 - Criticism and interpretation. 3. Female nude in art. 1. Tucker,
Paul Hayes. 1950- ND553.M43A72 1998
759-4 — dc2i 97—27062
CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-521-47466-3 hardback

ISBN 0-521-47984-3 paperback
 CONTENTS

Illustrations page vii

Acknowledgments ' ix
Contributors xi

1 Making Sense of Edouard Manet’s

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
PAUL HAYES TUCKER I

2 Sex and the Salon: Defining Art and Immorality

in 1863
ANNE MCCAULEY 38

3 Manet and the De-MoralizedViewer

JOHN HOUSE 75

4 To Paint, to Point, to Pose: Manet’s ZT Déjeuner

sur l’herbe
CAROL ARMSTRONG ÇO

5 Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe as a Family Romance

NANCY LOCKE 119

6 The Fascination with This Rendezvous Does Not Diminish ...

MARCIA POINTON IZ2

Bibliography 167
Index 175

v
 ILLUSTRATIONS

T. Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe page 2

2. Pablo Picasso, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe after Manet 3
3. Claude Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 8
4. Paul Cézanne, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 8
5. Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Corne From? Who Are We?
Where Are We Going? 9
6. Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme, et Volupté 9
7. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 10
8. Giorgione, Pastoral Concert 13
9. Edouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker 16
10. Edouard Manet, Mlle. V. . . in the Costumeof an Espada 17
11. Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Judgment of Paris 19
12. Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the
Seine (Summer) 21
13. Gustave Courbet, Hunt Picnic 22
14. Edouard Manet, Fishing 23
15. Edouard Manet, Olympia 25
16. Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus 39
17. Paul Baudry, The Pearl and the Wave (PersianFable) 39
18. Marcellin, Salon de 1863: Les Refusés 45
19. Marcellin, Le Salon de 1863-40 Série: Ds Folichons 47
20. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryne before the Tribunal 52
21. Pesme, Nude “académie” 55
22. Alexandre Antigna, After the Bath 77
23. Eugène Guérard, Long Live Wine, Long Live
the Fruit Divine 78

VI
I
VIII ILLUSTRATIONS

24. Auguste Glaize, Misery the Procuress 80

25. Alfred Stevens, Morning in the Country 83
26. Edouard, Manet, Victorine Meurent <96
27. Edouard Manet, The Street Singer 97
28. Edouard Manet, The Fifer 98
29. Edouard Manet, Young Tidy in 1866 99
30 Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries 100
31. Edouard Manet, Gare Saint-Lazare 103
32. Giorgione, Tempesta 127
33. Advertisement for Alexei Sayle’s comedy series on British
Channel 4 TV 153
34. Bow Wow Wow, Go Wild in the Country 154
35. Posy Simmonds, Guardian cartoon 155
36. Mrs. Manet Entertains in the Garden 156
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes its initial inception and ultimate realization to

Beatrice Rehl, who generously invited me to consider doing it back in
1994. Her patience during these many years, together with her humor,
good will, and keen intelligence have been a source of inestimable
comfort. Of course, the book could not have been written without the
welcome cooperation of its contributors. In addition to the inordinate
amount of time and effort they devoted to the project, they deserve my
deepest gratitude for their endurance. I suspect, like myself, they may
have thought it might not ever actually appear in print. I would like to
thank William D. Tucker, Jr. and Bob Herbert, who read my essay and
who have been constant touchstones for editorial clarity and breadth of
thinking. I would like also like to express my appreciation to my
devoted family — Maggie, Jonathan, and Jennie — who have been an
enduring source of inspiration, stability, and joy. Finally, I dedicate this
book to the individual who introduced me to the marvels of Manet some
twenty-five years ago and whose wisdom, humanism, and infective love
of looking led me to believe art history was a field I should consider
exploring. Thank you, S. Lane Faison.

9
 CONTRIBUTORS

PAUL HAYES TUCKER is professor of art history at the University of

Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Monet at Argenteuil (1982),
Monet in the 90s. 77te Series Paintings (1990), Richard Upton and the
Rhetoric of Landscape (1991), and Claude Monet. Life and Art (1995).
He has written numerous articles, reviews, and chapters in books on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and has organized many
exhibitions, including Monet in the 90s. The Series Paintings (Boston-
Chicago-London, 1990) and Monet. A Retrospective (Tokyo-Nagoya-
Hiroshima, 1994). Currently, he is organizing an exhibition of Monet's
work of the twentieth century (Boston-London, 1998) and of the
Impressionists at Argenteuil (Washington- Hartford, 2000). He also is
writing the catalogue of the French paintings in the Lehman Collection at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ANNE MCCAULEY is professor of art history at the University of

Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of A.A.E. Dis déri and the Carte
de Visite Portrait Photograph (1985), Industrial Madness: Commercial
Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (1994), and many articles on
nineteenth-century photography and caricature. She is currently
preparing books on the historiography of photography and on Edward
Steichen s career in France

JOHN HOUSE is professor of the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of

Art, University of London. Fie is the author of Monet: Nature into Art
(1986) and was co-organizer of the Post-Impression

XI
XII CONTRIBUTORS

ism exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (l979~Bo) and

of. the Renoir exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London, and the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1985-6), as well as guest
curator of Impressions of France at the Hayward Gallery,
London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1995—6).

CAROL ARMSTRONG is associate professor of art history at the Graduate

Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Odd
Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (1991).
She has just finished a book on nineteenth-century photographic
illustration and has written numerous essays on Degas, Manet, and
nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography. She is currently at work
on a book on Manet.

NANCY LOCKE is assistant professor of art history at Wayne State

University in Detroit where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-
century art and theory7. Her current research focuses on the figurative
work of Cézanne and on representations of the body in Cubist sculpture.
She is also completing a book entitled Manet. A Family Romance:

M ARCIA POINTON is Pilkington Professor of History of Art at the

University of Manchester. She has written extensively on British and
French art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on portraiture, and
on patronage and issues of gender in visual culture. Her recent
publications include Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting
1830—1908 (1990); The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual
Culture since the Renaissance (1993), edited with Kathleen Adler;
Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-
Century England (1993); and Strategies for Showing: Women,
Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1650—1800
(1997). She is currently engaged in research on the display of jewels and
jewelry in early modern Europe
 1 PAUL HAYES TUCKER----------------------------------------------
MAKING SENSE OF
EDOUARD MANET’S
LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

In late summer 1959, some ninety-six years after Edouard

Manet completed his ambitious painting depicting a group of
contemporary men and women picnicking and bathing in a lush forest
glade, Pablo Picasso began a series of variations on his elder’s famous
image (Figs. I and 2). It was hardly the first time the Spaniard had
devoted his energies to reworking a specific Old Master painting; he had
plundered the past for most of his career. In the fifteen years prior to his
engagement with the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, he actually had done
variations on nearly half a dozen major canvases, from Nicolas Poussin’s
Triumph of Pan of 1635 (National Gallery, London) and Eugène
Delacroix’s Women of Algiers of 1834 (Louvre, Paris) to Diego
Velazquez’s Las Meninas of 1656 (Prado, Madrid), producing no less
than forty-five paintings of the latter alone.1
This “window opening” process, as Picasso called his practice, was
prompted as much by Picasso’s advancing years and his desire to
measure himself against recognized masters as by his rightful sense of
the importance of those paintings to their respective artists and the
contributions those individuals made to the advancement of Western art.
The paintings also often held specific meanings for Picasso, confirmed
interests he had long expressed, and challenged him to rethink his aims
as an artist, “to get behind the canvas,” as he put it, in the hope that
“something will happen,”2 The series devoted to Manet’s Déjeuner sur
l’herbe, or Luncheon on the Grass, while part of Picasso’s personal
campaign, would be decidedly dif-

1
PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Figure I. Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863. Musée

d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo R.M.N.)

ferent, as Douglas Cooper sensitively pointed out shortly after Picasso

completed it
First, the group was enormous in size, totaling one hundred and fifty
drawings, twenty-seven paintings, five concrete pieces of sculpture that
were preceded by eighteen cardboard studies, several ceramic plaques,
and three linoleum cuts. This constituted the single largest concentration
of material prompted by any individual work of art that the twentieth-
century master had ever produced.3
Picasso also devoted more time to this series than to any other; he
worked on it off and on for more than three years in three dif-
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 3

Figure 2. Pablo Picasso, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe after Manet,

Vauvenargues, March 3-August 22, i960. Musée Picasso, Paris. (Photo
R..M.N.)

ferent locations.4 In addition, the group was more diverse than any
previous ones. Besides employing different media, Picasso has the
figures change clothing, appearance, and location; the landscape shifts,
slides, and disappears; the accouterments — fruits, breads, canes, boats,
and birds — are featured in some paintings and drawings and edited in
others.
Most poignantly, perhaps, particularly for this volume of collected
essays on Manet’s picture, Picasso offers an unprecedented number of
ways to interpret the original scene by devising variation after variation
on the action Manet depicted. At one moment, the protagonists in Manets
reformulated picture are engaged in what appears to be a normal
conversation; at another, they are embroiled in an interrogation or are
admonishing one another. In some scenes, the women offer themselves to
the viewer and their male companions; in others, they withdraw or
become involved in forms of self-examination. Occasionally, all of the
figures appear casual and relaxed, at other times, stiff and uneasy, at still
others, blank-faced or terrorized. They vacillate between being humorous
4 PAUL HAYES TUCKER
and horrible, intimate and indifferent, childlike and
mature. They also change identity - from bourgeois student
to Jewish intellectual to arcadian shepherd to Grecian bard
and from model to seductress to heroine to victim.
One could say that all of this has more to do with Picasso than with
Manet. And in part that is correct. After all, it was Picasso who created
the series, conceiving it both as an homage to an artist he admired (one
who also had appreciated the art of Picasso’s own Spanish past) and as a
way to test his powers against a renowned figure. Given Picasso’s
competitive nature, the series also was a means to bury the achievement
of his predecessor under the onslaught of Picasso’s own inventiveness.
But for whatever it tells us about Picasso, the series affirms even
more the incredible complexity of Manet’s picture For it clearly was the
painting’s insolence and enigmas, its historical resonance and aesthetic
idiosyncrasies that pushed the aging twentieth-century artist to such
iconographie and painterly extents, encouraging him to be as
contradictory as he was consistent, as impenetrable as he was
straightforward, just like his nineteenth-century counterpart.
It is precisely these dialectics — so typical of the modern age from
Manet’s moment to our own — as well as their relation to
contemporaneous issues that have contributed to the iconic status of
Manet’s inimitable canvas.5 That Picasso would have noted many of
these oppositions — and suggested many more — is a sign of his keen
sensitivity to Manet’s intelligence and skill and to the Dejeuner’s powers
of suggestion.
His series, however, like Manet’s painting, presents us with a host of
unresolved questions because Picasso had little to say about the group.
This is not surprising. The ever-evasive master was essentially
confirming what Manet and his nineteenth-century avant-garde friends
had often suggested: that the language of painting is fundamentally
different from most written or spoken forms, just as the artist’s stylus or
brush is not the same as the critic’s keyboard or pen.6
The exclusivity of those tools, just like the mutual compulsion of
most artists to let their art speak for itself, forces the historian to search
for whatever meanings a painting like the Déjeuner may possess in a
variety of tangential, if not sometimes contradictory, realms, as the
essays in this volume reveal.
This has always been the case. Writers in Manet’s own day,
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 19

struggling to make sense of his baffling canvas, looked to a number of

sources for assistance — contemporary 7 art and events, past images and
art-historical hierarchies, Manet’s training or lack thereof, writings on the
artist, friends statements about the picture, Manet’s own references to it. 7
Many of these authors may have felt they were privy to something that
approached the truth — about the picture and their observations. Some of
them knew the artist personally; others knew of him; most were at least
vaguely familiar with his work. All of them lived at the same moment as
he, in the same country and city. Many came from the same middle-class
background if not the same Parisian neighborhood
For all of their advantages — and they were considerable — these
observers unfortunately prove to be only partially reliable guides. The
meanings they found in the Déjeuner, the problems they felt compelled
to enumerate, even the pleasures they derived from the picture or their
reading about it depended as much on their point of view — or on their
editor’s — as on the painting itself. Dispassionate assessments were rare,
if they existed at all. This may be self- evident to readers who are
accustomed to divergent voices, but it is worth repeating, particularly in
the late twentieth century when similacrum often poses for the real and
differences easily evaporate in the h omogenizing process of
globalization The comments of all of these contemporaries, therefore,
while important grist for the mills of later historians, nonetheless cannot
be taken at face value.8
The same must be said of statements made by or attributed to Manet
himself. Like the critics, the artist and those who may have recorded his
observations clearly were not unbiased observers. Manet in particular had
a very specific agenda - to become one of the leading French painters of
his day/Io be sure, he did not hold exclusive title to that desire; every
aspiring artist laid claim to it in .one form or another, which meant the
Parisian art world of Manet’s day was nothing if not competitive, again
not so dissimilar, in that respect at least, to the art centers of our time.
What then can we rely on to make sense of Manet’s painting? The
picture itself, one might think. But even here much remains unknown.
We are not certain, for example, exactly when Manet began the canvas,
where he painted it, or when he declared it finished. We don’t know who
all the models were, how he had the idea of posing one of them stark
naked and the others in their own
6 PAUL HAYES TUCKER
worlds, seemingly oblivious to everything around them. We don’t know
how many preparatory works he may have done for the picture, what
other works of art from his own hand or by others he may specifically
have been thinking about as the picture evolved, or what relation he
wanted to establish between this picture and others he planned to exhibit
with it. We don’t even know why he gave it the title he did; he originally
called it Le Bain, or The Bath, not Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.9 Most
surprising, perhaps, we have no assurances about the meaning of the
picture. It offers us so many possibilities — just like Picasso’s series -
that it is virtually impossible to separate one fam the others and declare it
definitive.
It is, therefore, an ideal candidate for a book such as this, the timing
of which also could not be better. That is because the ways in which we
can understand Manets painting have been increased in recent years by
the happy expansion of art-historical inquiry to include methods derived
from the criticism of other media, most notably literature and film, from
gender and philosophical studies, and from more textured probes based
on revised notions of the interrelation between history biography, and the
production of art. The following essays, all written exclusively for this
volume by leading scholars of nineteenth-century art, were chosen to
provide the reader with a sense of the discipline's present breadth and the
range of opinions it can generate.
Limitations of time and space prevented the inclusion of many other
voices; every project has its boundaries. This collection, therefore, does
not claim to cover all of the problems the picture raises or represent all of
the methods presently used by art historians. It thus does not pretend to
be the last word on the subject.The number of things we do not know
about the picture should be sufficient caution about the latter.
Nonetheless, it is hoped that these essays prove to be sufficiently
satisfying or, conversely, challenging — both individually and as a group
— that they reap their rightful praises and prompt further probes of
Manet’s painting.
There is an obvious question, however, that should be posed before
we turn to those discussions - namely, why have we singled out this
particular picture5 What makes it so important?
In order to answer these questions, we need to ask others. For
example, did the painting mark a radical change in Manets work or
reorientate the evolution of modernist art? Did Manet invest so
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 7

much in it intellectually or emotionally that it provides us

with unique access to his thinking as an artist7 Was it sold for
some fabulous amount of money like so many celebrated
pictures today and thereby reveals sometliing special about
the passions or peculiarities of Manet's collectors? Or was it
a painting that was rediscovered after a period of neglect and
deemed worthy of attention on the basis of its obscurity or
formal qualities?
I he answer to all of these questions is no. The painting did not
drastically affect the development of Manet’s art or that of his modernist
contemporaries. Manet did not endow it with the kind of emotional or
intellectual weight that would make it the sole key to his mind-set
(though it certainly tells us much about him). Nor did he sell it for any
spectacular sum. In fact, it remained in his hands until 1878 when the
opera singer and active collector of Impressionist art, Jules Faure,
purchased it for 2,600 francs, a respectable price but far below the 25,000
francs that Manet had claimed to be the paintings value in 1871.10 5

Part of its claim to fame comes from the clamor it caused when it was
first exhibited in Paris in 1863 - it attracted considerable attention from
contemporary critics — and from the fact that it almost immediately
became a touchstone for avant-garde painters; Claude Monet, for
example, did a monumental version of the picture (Fig. 3) only twenty-
four months after it appeared, cleansing the original of its nudity and
ambiguities in an apparent effort to make it even more modern and
believable. Paul Cézanne painted several variations on it shortly
thereafter (Fig. 4), and Paul Gauguin revisited it for the most important
painting of his career, Where Do We Gome From? Who Are We? Where
Are We Going? of 1897 (Fig. 5), which includes various references to
Manet’s picture, the most apparent being the Tahitian girl seated on the
right who is based on the Dejeuner’s foreground nude. Henri Matisse
borrowed the picnic theme and the combination of clothed and nude
figures for his Luxe, Calme, et Volupté of 1904-5 (Fig. 6), and Picasso
exploited the foreground nude again for the masked female on the right
in his groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 (fig- 7)- That
Picasso would come back to Manet’s picture nearly half a century later is
ample testimony to its continuing powers and to the prodigious line of
artistic responses that it produced.1 '
What attracted avant-garde artists to the picture and what made
Figure z. Claude Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865-6. Pushkin Museum,
Moscow.

Figure 4. Paul Cézanne, Is Déjeuner sur l’herbe, c 1870—71. Private

collection, Neuilly-sur-Seine.
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 9

Figure 5. Paul Gauguin, H7iw / X> II, (.Nite /-rilin' 111M. Ire Hi•? HChw. If* 11 < (Nui\
E. 1X9- Tompkins Collection Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts. Boston.

Figure 6. Henn Matisse, Luxe, Câline, ft I-elupte. 1904 Musée d’Orsay.

Paris. (Photo R.M.N.)
JO PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Figure 7. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. (Photo © 1998 The Museum of
Modern Art, New York)

it so controversial when it was first exhibited are not necessarily what viewers
today generally find so startling — namely, the boldness of the female figure who
sits without a stitch of clothing on in front of us and her male companions and
who has the audacity to stare at us in such a self-conscious, unflinching manner.
She knows that we know she is naked. She also is fully aware that we are staring
at her with the same directness that she foists upon us. This curious exchange
makes most people feel slightly uneasy or at least a bit perplexed, particularly
because Manet offers no clues as to what is occurring in the picture or what our
relationship is supposed to be to the scene as a whole. Have we stumbled upon
some
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 25

kind of intimate sexual encounter? Are we implicated in some way ?

Why does the woman look at us so unabashedly, and why are the
men beside her so disengaged with her and each other7
Mystery does not make for immortality, however, just as it does not
automatically elevate the mundane to the meaningful For all of the interest these
unresolved relationships can generate - one of the more astute critics in Manet’s
day could “not imagine what made an artist of intelligence and refinement select
such an absurd composition ’ — they were not the only nor even the primary point
of contention for Manets contemporaries. 12 The power of Manets painting then as
well as now lies beyond these enigmas; it has something to do with that naked
female, to be sure, but also with the size and subject of the painting, the way
Manet conceived and executed it, the environment in which he wanted to display
it, and the ways in which it relates to past precedents as well as to the art of
Manet’s time.
To appreciate the profundity of these issues, let us turn to the picture and those
facts about it that we can more or less corrobo- ** rate First, it is large — 208 X
264 cm — and is painted on a twill woven canvas. The support was standard; the
size was not. From the eighteenth century onward, canvases were available in
standard sizes, from 21.6 X 16 2 cm or 8 X 6 inches up to 194.4 X 129.6 cm or 72
X 48 inches. They were all referred to by number; a number 10 canvas was 20 X
17 inches, a 20 was 27 X 22 inches, a 30 was 34 X 27 inches, and so on. By the
1840s, artists could purchase these canvases prestretched and primed. If an artist
wanted a canvas larger than 194 4 X 129.6 cm or a number 120, it had to be
specially ordered or stretched by hand in the artist’s studio. 13 Given the expense of
the labor and materials, it is unlikely that Manet would have had a fresh canvas
this size on hand. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that this was a custom
affair, that the size of the final painting was determined long before Manet began
work on it, and that its dimensions were dictated by the scene Manet had in mind
It so happens the Déjeuner is about the same size that history painters
frequently used for their re-creations of noble events. I -fis was not a coincidence.
Artists were not required to use specific formats for specific subjects, but they
were expected to follow guidelines, and generally they did. Big canvases were
reserved for subjects deemed important, which meant those drawn from history,
religion, and mythology. More modest canvases were for subjects of
12 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

corresponding significance - that is, still lifes, portraits, genre paintings, and
landscapes — in other words, for subjects of lesser standing. 14 Manets choice
reversed these norms because his scene was decidedly lower on the hierarchy, but
it was painted on a scale that implied the opposite. That Manet elevated a
commonplace subject to a level it did not warrant is crucial to understanding his
picture because it underscores his knowledge of the contemporary codes of artistic
conduct and his determination to undermine at least one of their basic premises.
As we shall see, he was out to challenge many others as well.
The size of the painting attests to Manet s ambition not only in relation to
prevailing norms but also in terms of Manet s own efforts; it was the largest
painting he had attempted since entering the profession in January 1850 as a
student of the respected academician Thomas Couture. He clearly was out to make
a name for himself, though he may not have foreseen — or appreciated — the
notoriety that his name would earn him.
borne of Manet’s contemporaries asserted that he could predict the reactions
his pictures would provoke and that he specifically knew the Déjeuner would
draw negative blasts even before he began it. The primary source for these
assertions is his boyhood friend Antonin Proust, who became minister of the
interior in 1870 and minister of fine arts in France in the early 1880s. In his often
cited memoirs, Proust describes a day when he and Manet were lying on the banks
of the Seme at Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris, watching some boats under sail when
they spotted women bathing in the river, which made Manet think of the Italian
Renaissance artist Giorgione’s painting Pastoral Concert (Fig. 8). “When we
were in [Coutures] studio,” he apparently confided to Proust, “I copied Giorgione
s women, the women with musicians. It’s black that painting. The ground has
come through. I want to redo it and to re-do it with a transparent atmosphere with
people like those you see over there. I know it’s going to be attacked, but they can
say what they like”15
Whether Manet actually said this or not is difficult to determine. Proust is
relatively reliable, but this combination of clairvoyance and defiance smacks of
the prejudice of the author and the advantages of hindsight. It allowed Proust to
trumpet his friend’s cunning and intelligence and to support his contention that the
 MAKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

Figure 8. Giorgione, Pastoral Concert, c. 1508. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

(Photo R.M.N.)

Déjeuner was uniformly criticized, which, as we shall see, it was not. To cast
further doubt on the matter, Proust did not publish his memoirs until the 1890s,
more than ten years after Manets death and more than thirty after the supposed
conversation. In addition, as even Edgar Degas pointed out in the 1890s, the
Dejeuner does not have the kind of atmospheric effects that would lead one to
believe it had been painted outdoors or inspired by the sight of women actually
emerging from the Seine. It is a contrived, studio picture with the nude in the
foreground for all she may represent acting like a model in an artists atelier. Degas
claimed Manet may have rftade this statement but only after seeing later paintings
by his younger challenger Monet.16
Regardless of these discrepancies, the connections Proust made between the
Déjeuner and Giorgione s painting are important and are ones Manet certainly
must have made himself at some point
14 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

during the gestation of his picture, whether in Argenteuii or back in Paris. After
all, the Pastoral Concert was one of the treasures of the l ouvre, a museum Manet
stalked. Moreover, Manet had already copied other celebrated works by Old
Masters such as Titian, Velazquez, Tmteretto, and Rubens. And he had developed
an interest in appropriating motifs from his predecessors’ pictures for use in his
own. He even had a copy of the Giorgione by his friend Henri Fantin-Latour
hanging in his studio at the time. That he may have been interested in modernizing
Giorgione s scene, therefore, would have been in keeping with his own interest
and practice.17
The ultimate proof lies in Giorgione’s picture, which shares an undeniable
number of similarities with Manet’s. The two males in the Giorgione, for
example, are dressed in clothing typical of their day, as are the two in Manet’s
picture. They sit in an idyllic landscape like the lush setting Manet provides. The
two seem equally unaware of the females in their company, which is all the more
surprising since both are contrastingly naked. The primary figures in both pictures
occupy their respective foregrounds, with the space behind them receding in
planes that run parallel to the picture plane, enlivened by a similar scattering of
strong lights and darks. Finally, Manet’s canvas is linked to its antecedent by its
size; it is almost exactly twice the height and length of Giorgione’s - 208 X 264
cm versus 109 X 137 cm - suggesting Manet took his proportions from Giorgione
but challenged his Venetian compatriot by enlarging the latter’s scene by almost
three and a half times its surface area.
The ambitiousness of Manet’s enterprise — his desire to take on a recognized
master of Renaissance art and to rework a famous painting in the Louvre on a
scale he had never attempted before — was remarkable for an artist who was just
beginning a public career. It also is a bit unusual given his less than auspicious
debut. Although he spent more than six years in Couture’s studio (January 1850 to
February 1856) and then passed three years working independently in Paris with
two trips to various countries in Europe thrown in (in 1853 and 1856), Manet did
not openly test his mettle against his peers and his nation’s artistic traditions until
the end of the decade when he decided to enter the competition for the biannual
Salon. The Salon was a state-sponsored exhibition held in the Palais de 1’Industrie
on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, near the present-day site of the Grand Palais.18
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 15

From those who ran it to those who read about it, this immense gathering of
paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings - it was intended to contain 2,000 to
5,000 works — was universally acknowledged as the most important venue in
nineteenth-century France for established as well as aspiring artists. Those lucky
enough to survive the scrutiny of the jury composed of their peers could
demonstrate their talents, make a name for themselves, and perhaps attract
collectors or commissions, thereby earn a living and call themselves professional
Thousands of people fem all walks of life traipsed through the exhibition every
day during its multimonth run The numbers swelled five- to tenfold on Sundays,
when the government eliminated the entry fee and admitted everyone without
charge.
During the 1850s, thanks to the generosity of his parents, Manet was able to
avoid tins stringent system of judgment and supermarket-like display of work and
devote himself exclusively to developing his art as a perennial student. His father
had risen to a serious post in the Ministry of Justice in the 1830s and then had
been appointed a judge in the Court of First Instance of the Seine in Paris.
Between salary and investments, he had the means to support his eldest son’s
aspirations to become an artist despite his initial resistance to Manets chosen
profession. (He had hoped Edouard would follow him into the law.)
Perhaps in an effort to justify his decision to his parents, perhaps to confront
the inevitable, Manet abandoned his student status in 1859 and presented one of
his paintings to the Salon jury for the first time. Entitled The Absinthe Drinker
(Fig. 9), the picture depicts a local ragpicker leaning rather tipsily against a stone
wall in an undefined space. The painting was rejected without explanation, typical
of the jury’s proceedings. Manet reworked the painting twice later in his career,
thus making it difficult to assess the jury’s decision. However, its subject alone
would have been grounds for dismissal because art in France was serious
business. It was not a place for drunkards rendered on the scale Manet had
achieved here, especially when his picture so strongly recalled the disturbing
poetry’of his contemporary and friend Charles Baudelaire.19
Manets fortunes changed when he submitted two other paintings to the jury for
the Salon of 1861, The Spanish Singer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
and the Portrait of M. and Mme. Auguste Manet (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Both
were accepted. Again, this is not
16 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Figure 9. Edouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker, 1859. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,

Copenhagen. (Photo R.M.N.)

surprising because both display a

greater degree of decorum. The
brushwork in each is more restrained,
the color more localized, the shading
more gradual. In addition, the
subjects, although undistinguished, at
least are more palatable, the former
appealing in particular to the vogue
for things Spanish that swept Paris at
the time.
Gaining admission to the Salon
was triumph enough for the then
twenty-nine-year-old artist, but
Manet did even better; he received
positive notices in the press for his
submissions, and best of all, from the
jury, an honorable mention for The
Spanish Singer. This was a coveted
award, particularly for an artist who
was just starting out. It not only
confirmed Manets talent but it also
portended a successfill future
The latter was not to be, at least not immediately, since the com-
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 17

Fipure 10. I douard Manet \///< I in fin ( ntinn< <<t .in I -JKI.I.I, Mdrt>p<>litan Museum
<>1 Art. New York II O Haaemeaet l oik i non Bequest of Nirs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.
(29.100.53) bination of hu ,u I iie\ cincius in iHtu undoubtedly led Man et u > <011 sider
painting the Deifunct I he canvas did not pass the para when Manet submitted it in March
1*6;. nor did the two other paintings he offered tor the jura’s consideration A We I tu lin
Cditum N
18 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

an Espada (Fig. io) and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.) This was a serious setback that must have
disappointed the promising artist despite what he may have confided to Antonin
Proust about the Déjeuner.
Manet was not the only painter to feel the pangs of rejection The jury was
especially severe that year and had refused to admit more than half of the nearly
5,000 canvases that had been submitted: 2,783 to be precise. This provoked such
outrage among artists and critics that Napoleon III, Emperor of France since his
coup d’état in 1851, himself announced the creation of a special exhibition that
would be devoted to the rejected pictures. Artists who had been denied entry to
the regular Salon could decide for themselves whether they wanted to participate
in what soon became known as the Salon des Refusés; no jury would screen their
resubmissions. Not every rejected artist took up the invitation, with good reason.
There was the very real possibility that the public would agree with the official
Salon jury, which would make the Refusés exhibition a double mockery for the
participants.20
Several hundred artists accepted, however, Manet among them.. He showed all
three works that had been rejected, hanging the two costume pieces on either side
of the Déjeuner. The trio attracted considerable attention, with most critics
focusing upon the central canvas. Contrary to what is often written about these
critics, they did not uniformly attack the picture. To be sure, they made plenty of
disparaging remarks: "Not one detail has attained its exact and final form,” railed
Jules Castagnary, one of the more astute apologists for the realist movement.
I see garments without feeling the anatomical structure which supports them
and explains their movements. I see boneless figures and heads without skulls.
I see whiskers made of two strips of black cloth that could have been glued to
the cheeks. What else do I see? The artist s lack of conviction and sincerity.21
But there were many positive things said as well. One critic actually claimed
Manet “will triumph one day, we do not doubt, over all the obstacles which he
encounters, and we will be the first to applaud his success.” 22 Even Castagnary felt
Manets pictures possessed “a certain verve m the colors, a certain freedom of
touch which are in no way commonplace.”23
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 33

Figure II. Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Judgment of Paris, c. 1475-before 1534.
Bequest of Mrs. Horatio Greenough Curtis in memory of Horatio Greenough Curtis.
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Besides the relatively balanced reception the picture enjoyed, what is

surprising is the fact that no critic noticed the now often cited appropriations that
Manet had made from earlier art. The most rehearsed concerns Marcantonio
Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s now lost Judgment of Paris (Fig. 11). In
Manet’s day, this print was widely considered to be Raimondi’s best work and
would have been known to Manet by its currency in artistic circles as well as from
his own interest in graphics. 24 With characteristic deftness, Manet took the three
figures in the lower right of Raphael’s image - two river gods and a water nymph
sitting by the marshes at the foot of Mount Ida during the mythical selection of the
most beautiful woman in the world - and transposed them into the two Parisian
men about town and their naked female compan
20 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

ion. While retaining the general disposition of the classical figures, Manet not
only altered their identities and poses but he also changed their trappings,
attitudes, setting, and relationships, giving them greater individuality and presence
than they possessed in the original. He maintained their enigma — they make no
clear contribution to Raphael’s story, nor do they appear to interact among
themselves. At the same time, he injected plenty of wit into the scene, substituting
the cane for the reed in the dandy’s hand on the right, the overturned fruit basket
and ribbon-wrapped bonnet for Athena’s discarded helmet and shield, and the frog
in the lower left corner — a symbol of lasciviousness as well as of France — for
Raimondi’s reference to Raphael directly below the seated nymph. (It was
precisely this kind of imaginative plundering and recasting that must have
appealed to Picasso.)
Scholars have offered a host of other artists and images as additional sources
for the Déjeuner. Michael Fried, for example, has claimed that “Watteau’s art
presides oyer the conception of the Déjeuner as a whole” in an extended argument
about the importance of French precedents for Manet’s development. 25 Anne
Hanson and Beatrice Farwell have rightfully pointed to lesser-known nineteenth-
century painters and printmakers who produced Wat- teau-like subjects of picnics
and outdoor revelry through the 1860s, thus diminishing Manet’s reliance on a
single eighteenth-century figure and at the same time emphasizing the importance
of popular imagery and the social practices of Manet’s own day.26
There is general consensus that Gustave Courbet was one of Manet’s most
significant touchstones for the Déjeuner. The champion of the palette knife and
subjects drawn from real life, Courbet had often put the art of the past at the
service of his own needs; he even pillaged the same Raimondi print twice before
Manet had set upon it.27 With good reason, therefore, his Young Ladies on the
Banks of the Seine (Summer) of 1856-57 (Fig. 12) is often held up as an important
antecedent foi the Déjeuner.28 It had stirred similar emotions when it was first
exhibited at the Salon of 1857, primarily because of its scandalous subject matter -
two working-class girls lying on the mossy edge of the river in quite unladylike
poses. The one in the foreground has even doffed her dress; she stretches out on
top of it, wearing nothing but her undergarments. As contemporaries noted, these
women are of questionable repute, although it
 MAKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

Figure 12. Gustave Courbet, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer),
1856—7. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. (Photo © Phototèque des Musées de la
Ville de Paris)

is not certain whether they are prostitutes or lesbians. They may even be both;
their sense of mutual satisfaction is reflected in their languid bodies and bleary
expressions, and the top hat in the boat laces .the scene with the scent of a man.
Manet has simply pushed beyond his elder colleague’s initiatives, forcing, as
Françoise Cachin has argued, in a more “impudent” fashion all of the issues
Courbet had raised down to Manet’s bolder application of paint and his audacity
in depicting such a starkly nude figure.29
It is also quite possible that Courbet’s Hunt Picnic of 1858 (Fig. 13) served as
an additional precedent for Manet, as Linda Nochlin pointed out more than
twenty-five years ago.30 In addition to its own references to eighteenth-century
prototypes, such as Carle van Loo’s Halt in the Hunt (Musée du Louvre, Paris),
which Manet would
22 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Figure iz. Gustave Courbet, Hunt Picnic, i858.Wallraf-Richartz-Museum,

Cologne.

have appreciated, Courbets painting contains numerous details that reappear in

Manets scene For example, there are the prominent still life elements in the
foreground, the highly stylized poses of the figures, even the curious relationships
that Courbet estabfishes between several of the protagonists — the central hunter
with his elbow on his knee, for instance, who appears completely detached from
the group as a whole, or the woman behind him to the left who seems to be
reacting to the entreaties of the young wine steward by the river, unbeknownst to
anyone else in the picture
These and other details in the Dejeuner have been seen as deriving from other
possible sources. Cachin, for example, has noted the correspondence between the
picnic paraphernalia in the lower left of Manet s picture and the still life complete
with similar basket that appears in the same location in Titian’s Virgin un th a
White Rabbit (Louvre, Paris), a painting Manet copied in 1854. 31 Various scholars
have pointed to the fact that the boat in the Déjeuner recalls the craft in Courbets
Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) and is reminiscent of the one in
Manets own Fishing of 1861 (Fig. 14).
 MAKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

Figure 14. Edouard Manet, Fishing, c. 1861. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Bernhard, Gift, 1957. (57.10)

They also have noted the similar pose of the bather in the Déjeuner and the
bending fisherman in the center of Manets Fishing.32 That same bather has also
been linked with the figure of Saint John in an engraving after a tapestry cartoon
by Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes of 1515 (Victoria and Albert
Museum, London) as well with the wading woman in Watteaus now lost The
Village Girl 33 Wayne Andersen has drawn attention to the bird that appears in the
top center of the Déjeuner, identifying it as a bullfinch, which symbolizes
promiscuity and naturalness. In addition to complementing the general
suggestiveness of the scene (much like the frog in the lower left, another symbol
of lasciviousness), the bird, Andersen claims, may be poised to perch on the
extended finger of the reclining figure on the right.34 Finally, the female in the
foreground is often seen as a more defiant, contemporary version of the biblical
Suzanna, surprised during her bath by her lusty elders, a subject Manet had treated
in The Nymph Surprised, likewise of 1861 (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artas,
Buenos Aires).35
In addition to the world of art, the Déjeuner is firmly rooted in
24 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

Manet’s personal biography. The landscape, for example, is generally assumed to

recall the He Saint-Ouen up the Seme from his family’s property at Gennevilliers.
The female nude is recognizable from The Nymph Surprised as well as from many
other paintings Manet executed during this early moment in his career. She was
Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model, who, after the Déjeuner, would be
transformed into Manet’s equally renowned Olympia (Fig. iz).3^ The two male
figures are also identifiable; the one on the right is based on Manets two brothers,
Eugène and Gustave, and the one in the center on the Dutch sculptor Ferdinand
LeenhofF, brother of Manets future wife Suzanne Leenhoff. 37 Thus, as Nancy
Locke in this volume rightfully asserts, the painting is a kind of family portrait.
Physically, the painting yields other pertinent facts. From x-rays taken in the
Louvre’s conservation laboratories, for example, we know that Manet made
numerous changes while painting the picture. 38 Victorinc’s discarded blue dress,
for instance, lies on top of leaves that once littered the left side of the scene; her
hair has been reworked, as have the trees on the left, their trunks swollen so they
could act as more substantial foils to the similarly entangled figures. To set those
figures off even more, Manet added the bush behind Victorine and Ferdinand; it
covers the trunks of thinner trees along the river’s edge while providing a
darkened backdrop for Manets models. The bush also breaks the band of water in
the background, enhancing the discontinuities of the picture and the difficulties of
determining if the pool to the right is on the same level as the water to the left.
Given the formal complexity of the picture, it is surprising that there are not
more such changes or pentimenti. Manet must have meticulously prepared the
painting with numerous drawings and sketches so that he knew exactly how to
proceed. Curiously, however, none of those preliminary works have survived.39
This paucity would have played right into the hands of those critics at the
Salon des Refusés who did not like the picture and whose biggest concern was
Manets apparent lack of forethought and skill By this they meant that Manet did
not plot out carefully enough all of the relationships in the picture — the
placement of the foreground figures, for example, or the spatial recession in the
scene that becomes quite implausible behind the trio. These critics also claimed
that Manet did not control the paint with adequate rigor, that he frequently
allowed too much paint to be on his brush
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 25

Figure 15. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo
R.M.N.)

at one time, resulting in a surface with caked or roughened areas. Moreover,

Manet’s “troweling” of his medium left too much evidence of the passage of the
brush over the canvas. Restraint was supposed to be the operative method, not
bravado.40
That is because the art of painting to the mid-nineteenth-cen- tury critic was
predicated on illusionism; thus, impasto had to be minimized or put to the service
of description, which meant the paint and the bristle marks had to be disguised or
made synonymous with the contours of the form being evoked. In addition,
wherever strong contrasts were not needed, transitions between light and shade
had to be carefully modulated, with colors traversing the tonal scale at almost
imperceptible gradations. Drawing also had to be clear and precise, not the
broadly applied lines that crudely declared the edges of things in Manet’s picture -
the folds in Victorine’s abdomen or neck, for example, or the fingers of her
companion on the right
The emphasis Manet places on these basic elements of art -
26 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

line, color, light, shade, surface, form, and space — was as intentional as his
choice of subject. Indeed, he conjoined the two in order to draw attention to the
fundamentals of his practice and his skill at manipulating them. To conservative
observers, he appeared to be mocking or compromising long-held premises about
painting. To more liberal contingents, he was boldly attempting to expand those
norms, removing the veils of illusionism and revealing paintings ability to speak
on many levels, just like the sister arts of poetry, music, drama, and literature.
This emphasis upon painting’s capacities and on ‘ art’ in the broadest sense of
the word was one of the subtexts of Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert, just as it
informed Raphael’s Judgment of Paris — the former exploring the relative merits
of poetry, the latter the eternal quest for beauty — which may explain some of
their appeal for Manet.41 But Manet seems to have had other issues in mind as
well, For his painting was central to his ongoing project of making art that was
beholden to his time. This meant not only choosing subjects that engaged modern
life but also rendering those subjects in ways that befitted the complexity of his
enterprise.42 These dictates were not of his making; they had been initiated by
romantic artists earlier in the century whose rallying cry “il faut être de son
temps” — “it is necessary to be of one’s time” — became the contemporaneous
imperative of avant-garde French culture.43 In literature, it gained formal
expression in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert; in drama, in
the plays of Henri Murger; in poetry, in the verse of Charles Baudelaire; in music,
in the songs of Jacques Offenbach; and in painting, in the canvases of Courbet.
Manet declared his allegiance to this project at the very beginning of his
professional career as The Absinthe Drinker took its cues from tins modernist
credo. The Spanish Singer and the portrait of his parents continued that
commitment, albeit in more tempered form, perhaps as a coy way to circumvent
the jury and get in front of the public. But the Déjeuner sealed the pact as it cast
serious doubts on notions of aesthetic decorum and parodied pictorial traditions
that had been in place since the Renaissance. 44 Nothing appears to be sacred,
fixed, or verifiable in the picture despite the palpitating presence of many of the
elements. Even the fruit that spills out of the basket, while virtually three-
dimensional, is totally incongruous — cherries ripen in June, figs in September. 45
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 27

The problems the picture posed — about subject, style, and meaning — had
their counterparts in the challenges French society itselt was experiencing at the
time. Those challenges were the result of monumental forces: the rise of industry
and technology, major shifts in population, and the growth of urban areas,
particularly Paris, which doubled in size between 1830 and 1850 and almost
doubled again between 1850 and 1870. These changes profoundly altered peoples
perceptions of the world and of themselves, creating as much excitement as
uneasiness, as much substance as veneer. What once had been relatively clear or
comprehensible, stable or reassuring suddenly had the potential of becoming the
opposite. Relationships, for example, roles and performances, spaces and
definitions, class affiliations, even gender categories, all became surprisingly
unstable as capital and mobility encouraged slippages and uncertainty, parody and
confrontation while at the same time breeding opposite yearnings for order and
conformity.
Manets painting operated in this larger complex of competing ideologies and
identities, a world in which truths collided with fic—" tions and the past could be
revered one moment and reviled the next. It is perhaps largely because of its
immersion in this fluid, unpredictable moment that the painting so successfully
defied definition. Its contradictions are its truths; its stubbornness and
selfconsciousness, its inventiveness and dexterity are the sources of the rage,
puzzlement, and admiration it has provoked.
It therefore is not surprising that the following essays diverge so widely even
though they’ take this one painting as their starting point. Like modern life, the
Déjeuner is pluralistic and polemical, filled with contingencies yet appearing
vivid, solemn, and self-sustaining, all of which makes it resistant to simple
explanation. Thus, like the long fine of protégés the painting has inspired, these
essays remind us of the richness of Manet’s achievement and the challenges that a
single picture can continue to pose, especially one as smart as the Déjeuner.
“Painting is a thing of intelligence,’ Picasso once said. “One sees it in Manet ... in
each of his brushstrokes ’ 46

NOTES
i On Picasso’s Déjeuner series see Douglas Cooper, Pablo Picasso. Les Dejeuners
(NewYork: Abrams, 1963); and Susan Grace Galassi, Picassos Variations on the
Masters: Confrontations with the Past (New York-Abrams, 1996), pp
28 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

185—203.This campaign is also intelligently discussed by Klaus

Gallwitz, Picasso at go (New York: Putnams, 1971); Jean
Sutherland Boggs, The Last Thirty Years,” in Sir Roland
Penrose, ed., Picasso in Retrospect (New York: Praeger, 1973);
Mary Mathews Gedo, Picasso. Art as Autobiography (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp 236-9; Marie-Laure
Bernadac, “De Manet à Picasso, l’éternel retour,” Bonjour
Monsieur Manet, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Musée d'art
moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 33-46; Richard
Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton. Princeton University
Press, 1987), pp. 244—8; Rosalind Krauss, I he Impulse to See,”
in Hal Foster, ed., Visions and Visuality, Dia Art Foundation
Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No. 2 (Seattle - Bay Press,
1988),pp. 51-78.
On Picasso’s engagement with other Old Masters, see Hélène Parmehn, “Picasso and
Las Menmas,” Yale Review 47 (June 1958), 578—88; Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian
Women and Picasso at Large,’ Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 125-234; and John Anderson,
“Faustus/Velasquez/ Picasso,” in Gert Schiff, ed., Picasso in Perspective (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 158-62; Marilyn McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology:
Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp
247—58; Jannie L. Cohen, “Picasso’s Explorations of *• Rembrandt’s Art, 1967-1972,”
Arts Magazine 58 (October 1983), 119-27;
Marie-Laure Bernadac, “Picasso: 1953-1972: Painting as Model,” in Late Picasso,
exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1988), pp. 49—94.
2 Cooper, as in note 1, pp. 32-3.
3. Picasso did fifteen paintings, two lithographs, nine etchings and aquatints, and some
seventy drawings after Delacroix’s Women of Algiers between December 1954 and April
1955. He completed the forty-five variations on Velasquez’s painting between August
and December 1957. Poussin’s painting prompted just one version after France was
liberated in 1944 Works by Cranach, Altdorfer, El Greco, Courbet, and Rembrandt all
spawned equally modest responses — one or two paintings and a handful of drawings or
prints for each executed between 1947 and i960
4. Technically, one could say Picasso’s Déjeuner series began in 1954 when he painted
four variations on Manet’s picture between June 26 and 29 (Zervos 16, 316—19). It also
could be argued that it did not end until the concrete sculptures were installed at the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966. But the period of greatest activity were the three
years between August 1959 when the drawings and paintings began in earnest and
August 1962 when Picasso completed the maquettes for the pieces of sculpture. During
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 29

this fertile moment, Picasso carried the project with him from Vauvenargues to la
Californie to the mas de Mougins.
5. Manet’s painting has always been central to an understanding of his
30 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

6. achievement and thus figures in all serious studies of the artist,

the most important of which, in order of their publication, are
Etienne Moreau- Nelaton, Manet raconté par lui-même, 2 vols.
(Paris: H. Laurens, 1926); Adolphe Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres
(Paris: Gallimard, 1941); Nils Gosta Sandblad, Manet: Three
Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund G. W. K. Gleerup, 1954); John
Richardson, Manet (Oxford: Phaidon, 1967); Michael Fried,
“Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art 1859—1865 J Artforum 7
(March 1969), 28—82; Theodore RefF, “Manet’s Sources: A
Critical Evaluation,” Artforum 8 (September 1969), 40—8; George
Manner, Manet peintre- philosophe: A Study of the Painter’s
Themes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1975); Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Beatrice Farwell, Manet and
the Nude: A Study in the Iconology of the Second Empire (New
York: Garland, 1981); Theodore Reff, Manet and Modem Paris,
exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art,
1982J; Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett, Manet 1832—
1883, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 1983); T J, Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art
of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985); Kathleen
Adler, Manet (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986); Juliet Wil^, son Bareau, The
Hidden Face of Manet, exhibition catalogue (London: Courtauld
Institute Galleries, i986);Vivien Perutz, Edouard Manet (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1993); and Alan Kreil, Manet and the
Painters of Contemporary Life (London’Thames and Hudson,
1996).
Manet’s work also has been the focus of serious attention in more general texts such
as John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th ed. (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1973); FL W. Janson and Robert Rosenblum, 19th Century Art (New York.
Abrams, 1984); and Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism. Art, Leisure, and Parisian
Society (New Flaven: Yale University Press, 1988).
And it features in a number of important articles, including Linda Nochlin, “The
Invention of the Avant-Garde in France 1830—1880,’ Art News Annual 34 (1968), 11-
18; Wayne Andersen, “Manet and the Judgment of Paris,” Art News 72, no. 2 (February
1973), 63-9; Eunice Lipton, “Manet: A Radicalized Female Imagery,” Artforum 13
(March 1975), 48-53; Beatrice Farwell, “Manet’s Bathers,” Arts Magazine 54, no. 9
(May 1980), 124-33. For the best discussions of its critical reception see note 7 below
Also see the bibliography at the en d of this volume.
6 Picasso made his contempt for critics clear in a conversation with Daniel Henry-
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 31

Kahnweilcr in Marilyn McCully, as in note 1, p. 252.

7. .For the best discussions of contemporary writings on the Déjeuner, see McCauley in
this volume; David Carrier, “Manet and His Interpreters,” Art History 8 (September
1985), 320-35; Alan Kreil, “Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ in the ‘Salon des Refusés’:
A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin 65
32 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

(June 1983), 316-20; and the groundbreaking study by George

Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1954).
8 It should be pointed out that visiting an exhibition in the nineteenth century was not a
prerequisite to writing a review of the same show; nor was being an art expert
considered obligatory. One of the sharpest observers of the Parisian art world in Manets
day, for example, was the poet and writer Charles Baudelaire, who had no formal art
training and actually admitted to writing about works of art he had not seen.
9. Manet subnutted the painting to the Salon des Refusés as Le Bain. He changed the title
to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in 1867 when he included it in a one-man show he staged by
the Pont d’Alma. It is likely that he changed the name to give the painting a more
contemporary ring, perhaps in response to Monets huge Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which
remained unfinished at the time. It also may have become a title friends (and/or critics)
had used for the picture. When Manet compiled an inventory of his studio in 1871, he
listed the painting as In Partie carrée, or The Party of Four. The latter has a number of
meanings, like the painting itself. Beyond indicating a social gathering of two men and
two women, it suggests a parody of classical types in the manner of the popular
contemporary songwriter Offenbach. It also had more base connotations as it was
common parlance for sexual activity between consenting couples. On these meanings
see Kreil, as in note 5, pp. 33—4, and Cachin. as in note 5, p. 170; for the inventory of
1871 see Dennis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstem, Edouard Manet: Catalogue Raisonné,
vol. 1 (Lausanne. Bibliothèque des Arts, 1975), p. 17.
The fact that Manet’s original title referred not to a picnic but to bathing helps to
explain the figure in the river in the background and partly justifies the nude in the
foreground. It also may have been a coy reference to Gustave Courbet’s Bathers of 1853
(Musée Fabre. Montpellier), a painting that had caused a stir when it was first exhibited.
The whole issue of nineteenth-century bathing practices and artists’ depictions of them
would benefit from further scholarly attention; happily, it is the subject of present
research by Linda Nochlin. For earlier investigations of the issue see Eldon N. Van
Liere, “Le Bain: The Theme of the Bather in Nineteenth Century French Painting,”
unpublished PhD. thesis, Indiana University, 1974; Eldon N. Van Liere, “Solutions to
Dissolutions- The Bather in Nineteenth Century French Painting,” Arts Magazine 54, no
9 (May 1980), 104-14, and Farwell, as in note 5.
The Déjeuner’s original title adds some credence to Antonin Proust’s suggestion that
the painting was partly inspired by the sight of women bathing in the Seine at
Argenteuil, although one should approach that suggestion with considerable skepticism.
See note 15 in this chapter.
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 45

10. The painting remained in Fame’s hands until 1898 when he sold it to Durand-Ruel for
20,000 francs, 5,000 francs less than Manet had originally asked. T he dealer sold it
shortly thereafter to Etienne Moreau- Nélaton, who donated it to the nation tn 1906. On
the painting’s provenance see Cachin, as in note 5, pp. 172-3, and Gary Tinterow and
Henri Loyrette, The Origins of Impressionism, exhibition catalogue (New York-
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), p. 401 On Faure and Manet see Anthea Callen,
‘Taure and Manet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 83 (March 1974). 157-78.
Manet’s asking price was overly ambitious. One could buy Old Master paintings for
that amount. It also was completely out of line with his own pricing system. Just a year
or two before, he had asked 1 000 francs for Boy Holding a Sword and admitted he
would let it go for 800 francs. (See Manets letter to his dealer Louis Martinet of c.
1860-61/1863, as cited in Bareau, as in note 5, p. 29.) In addition, 25,000 francs had
little relation to prices for paintings by contemporary French artists. Between 1838 and
1857 the average price for a contemporary landscape painting was 1,432 francs, for a
genre painting, 2,861, and for a history painting, 6,637. (See Harrison C. White and
Cynthia A. White, Canvases anj Careers. Institutional Change in the French Painting
World (Chicago: Utuver- sity of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 38-41, To be sure, prices for
certain contemporary works by sought-after artists could fetch more than 25,000 francs,
but they were the exceptions. Manet may well have wanted to place his picture on a par
with such pinnacles as a sign of his competitiveness. It also may have been a more
innocent, though no less telling, indication of how much he invested in the work.
11. On Matisse’s interest in Manet see Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli,
1984), pp. 40—4. Gauguin copied Manet’s Olympia in 1891 and carried a photograph
of the painting with him to the South Seas, using it as a touchstone for many of his
nudes of the 1890s; see Richard Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, exhibition
catalogue (Washington, D C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), pp. 202-3. Late in his life,
Gauguin fondly remembered the compliment Manet paid him when "the master,” as
Gauguin referred to Manet, first saw his work, see Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals,
by Van Wyck Brooks trans. (New York: Liveright, 1949), p. IZ2. Cézanne was no less
impressed with Manet and did variations on many of his works; see, for example,
Lionello Venturi, Cézanne, son art, son oeuvre, 2 vols (Paris- Paul Rosenberg, 1936),
#107, c. 1870 [private collection]; #238, 1875 [Musée de I’Orangene, Collection Jean
Walter and Paul Guillaume]; and #377, 1877-82 [Collection Janet Traeger Saiz, New
York]; on Monet’s huge picture see Joel Isaacson, Monet: ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’
(London Penguin, 1972).
12. W. Bürger [Théophile Thoré], “Salon de 1863,” L’Indépendance belge
32 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

(June ii, 1863); reprinted in his Salons de W. Bürger, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Internationale,
1870), vol. 1, p. 425, as cited and translated in Hamilton, as in note 7, p. 50.
13. On artists’ materials in the nineteenth century see David Bomford et al., Art in the
Making. Impressionism, exhibition catalogue (London: National Gallery of Art, 1990),
especially pp. 44~7 for information about canvases. Also see Anthea Callen, The
Techniques of the Impressionists (London: Orbis, 1982).
14. This association of size and subject matter dates back in France at least to the beginning
of the French Academy in the seventeenth century just as the formulation of the
hierarchies of what artists might paint was set down at the same time by André
Félibien, among others. See Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art Past and Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 95.
15. Antonin Proust, “Edouard Manet: Souvenirs,” La Revue blanche (February’—May
1897), pp. 171— 2, reprinted in Edouard Manet: Souvenirs (Paris: A. Barthélemy, H.
Laurens, 1913), p. 43. This often cited conversation has been vigorously questioned m
recent time. See, for example, Perutz, as in note 5, p. 96, who rejects it as “nonsense.’
The first person to link the Déjeuner and Giorgione s picture was Manet’s friend
Zachaire Astruc in “Le Salon de 1863,” Le Salon de 1863, feuilleton quotidien, no. 16
(May 20, 1863), 5. Also see the sensitive reading of the relationship between the two
pictures offered by Meyer Schapiro in The Apples of Cézanne,” Art News Annual 34
(1968), 34-53; reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries:
Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1978), pp. 1-38.
16 On Degas’s comments see Daniel Halèvy, Degas parle (Paris: La Palatine, i960), pp.
no—11, cited and translated in Mina Curtiss, My Friend Degas (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1964), p. 92; and Tin- terow, as in note 10, p, 131. Prousts
memoirs began in serial form in La Revue blanche (February-May 1897), pp. 125-35,
168-80, 201-7, Z06-15, 413-24, and became a book in 1913. Manet died in 1883.
Eunice Lipton was one of the first to emphasize the studio nature of the painting,
especially the fact that we are forced to confront the nude figure in the foreground not
as a representation of some mythological goddess but merely as a model posing for the
artist. See Lipton, as in note 5.This reading of the painting has been amplified by
Hanson, as in note 5, and rethought by McCauley and Armstrong in this volume
17 On the Fantm copy see Perutz, as in note 5, p. 216, note 97 Hanson, as in note 5, pp. 75,
92—3, asserts that Venetian painting would have been seen by Manet’s contemporaries
as realistic. Thus, his remaking of Giorgione’s painting with contemporary figures
would have been appropriate not only for his personal interest in contemporaneity but
also for the paint
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 33

18 ing itself. Francis Haskell makes similar points in his review of

the history of Giorgione’s painting. See Francis Haskell,
“Giorgione’s ‘Concert champêtre’ and its Admirers,” in Past and
Present in Art and Taste. Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), pp. 141-52. Among the many
nineteenth-century copies after the Giorgione, Haskell notes ones
by Bonnat, Cabanel, Cézanne, and Degas, placing Manet and
Fantin in appropriate company.
18. On the Salon see Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon. Art and the State in the Early
Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Albert Bonne,
The Academy and Trench Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971).
On Manet’s student days see Jean Alazard, "Manet et Couture,” Gazette des Beaux-
Arts 35 (1949), 213—18. On Couture see Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic
Vision (New Haven and London1 Yale University Press, 1980).
19. On The Absinthe Drinker see in particular Anne-Brigitte Fonsmarck, “ I he Absinthe
Drinker’ — and Manet’s Picture-making,” Copenhagen Papers in the History of Art 2
(1987), 76-92; Ewa Lajer-Burchart, “Modernity and the Condition of Disguise 1 Manet’s
‘Absinthe Drinker’,” Art Journal 45 (Spring 1985), 18-26: and Hanson, as in note 5, pp. 54
—5, who suggests it was the picture’s close connection with Baudelaire’s verse that made
Thomas Couture react so negatively to Manet’s canvas. On Manet’s relation to Baudelaire
see Lois Boe and Frances Hyslop, ‘Baudelaire and Manet: A Reappraisal,” in Lois Boe
Hyslop, ed., Baudelaire as a Love Poet and Other Essays (University Park1 Pennsylvania
State Press, 1969), pp. 87—130. Hamilton, as in note 7, p. 30, first noted the connection of
The Absinthe Drinker to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.
20. On the Salon des Refusés see Ian Dunlop, “The Salon des Refusés,” in The Shock of
the New (New York American Heritage Press, 1972), pp. ro-53; Albert Boime, “The
Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art,” Art Quarterly 32 (Winter 1969),
411-26; Rewald, as in note 5, pp, 69—92; and Daniel Wildenstein, “Le Salon des
Refusés de 1863 — Catalogue et Documents,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts 66, no 1160
(September 1965), 125—52.The catalogue lists 687 works; the supplement, printed
later, contains an additional 94, making a total of 781 entries. It is quite possible there
were more given the timing of the event There was at least one estimate of 1,500 See
La Revue artistique et littéraire (May 1863), p. 247, as cited in Kreil, as in note 7, p.
319.
21. Jules Castagnary, “Le Salon des Refusés,’ L’Artiste (August 15, 1863), p. 76, as cited
and translated in Hamilton, as in note 7, p. 48.
22. Edouard Lockroy, “L’Exposition des refusés,” Le Courrier artistique (May 16,1863),
p. 93, as cited in Kreil, as in note 7, p. 318.
23. Castagnary, as in note 21.
24. On Raimondi’s stature see Albert Boime, “Les Hommes d’affaires et les
34 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

25. arts en France au jyème siècle,” Actes de la recherche en

sciences sociales no 28 (June 1979), 62-3, cited in Cachin, as in note
5, p. 168. Also see Beatrice Farwell, “Manet’s ‘Espada’ and
Marcantomo,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 2 (1969), 197-207.
Ernest Chesneau recognized the reference to Raphael, but his insight
did not appear until 1864. See Ernest Chesneau, “Le Salon des
Refusés,” in L'Art et les artistes modernes en France et en
Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1864), pp. 188-9. Elis book must not have
circulated very widely or his observation given much credence
because no one mentions the connection to Raphael until 1908. See
Gustave Pauli, “Raphael und Manet,” Monatshefte fur
Kunstwissenschaft 1 (January-February 1908), 53-5.
26. Fried, as in note 5 This essay has been reproduced in its entirety in Fried’s recent book,
Manet’s Modernism or, The Pace of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), which also contains Frieds reconsideration of his thesis as well
as rejoinders to scholars who had critiqued it. Chief among the latter was Reff, as in
note 5
27. Hanson, as in note 5, pp. 94-5; Farwell, as in note 5; also see Farwell, French Popular
Lithography 1815—1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
28. Courbet appropriated the three contestants for Paris’s apple for the three figures in
Young Ladies of the Village of 1852 (City Art Gallery, Leeds), first noted by Theodore
Reff, “Courbet and Manet,” Arts Magazine 54 (March 1980), 98-103. He also used the
figure of Athena (who has her back to us in the print) for the foreground woman in The
Bathers of 1853 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier).
29. Fried, as in note 5, p. 43, was the first to point to Courbet’s Young Ladies on the Banks
of the Seine (Summer) as a touchstone; subsequent scholars have largely agreed.
30. Cachin, as in note 5, p 168 On the scandalous nature of Courbet’s picture see Sarah
Faunce and Linda Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, exhibition catalogue (Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Museum, 1988), pp. 133-4; Patricia Mainardi, “Gustave Courbet’s Second
Scandal: ‘Les Demoiselles du Village’,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 553 (January 1979), 95-
103; Suzanne Kahn and Martine Ecalle, “Les Demoiselles des Bords de la Seme,”
Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Gustave Courbet, no. 19 (1957), 1—17; and Hélène
Toussaint, Gustave Courbet (1819-1871), exhibition catalogue (Pans: Grand Palais,
1977), 126-9,
30 Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 145—7. Also
seeTinterow, as in note 10, pp. 128-9.
31. Cachin, as in note 5, p. 169.
32. On the ties to Manet's Fishing see Sandblad, as in note 5, and Anne Coffin Hanson,
Edouard Manet (1832-1883), exhibition catalogue (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum
of Art, 1966), pp. 47—9.
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 35

33. For the connection to “The Village Girl,” see Fried, as in note 25; on the link to
Raphael’s Miraculous Draught, see Reff and Manner, as in note 5.
34 Anderson, as in note 5
35. On the Nymph Surprised see Rosalind E. Krauss, “Manet’s ‘Nymph Surprised’,'
Burlington Magazine 109 (November 1967), 622—7: and Beatrice Farwell, “Maiiet’s
‘Nymphe surprise’,” Burlington Magazine 127 (April 1975), 224-9.
36. On the elusive Victorine Meurent see Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia. A Woman’s
Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (New York' Scribner’s,
1992). On the association of the landscape with Saint- Ouen see Hanson, as in note 5,
p. 94, and Cachin, as in note 5, p. 167. On the use of Saint-Ouen as the setting for other
paintings see Hanson, as in note 31.
37 There had been a long-standing argument about which brother may have posed for the
right-hand figure Moreau-Nélation claimed it was Eugène; Tabarant said it was
Gustave. Proust made the compromise and asserted it was a combination of the two.
See Moreau-Nélaton, as in note 5, vol 1, p 49; Tabarant, as in note 5, p. 61; and Proust,
as in note, 15, p. 172. The bathing figure remains unknown. Cachin says it may havg
been “Victorine again, or some composite figure,” whereas Proust insists it was a
young Jewish girl that Manet met on the street. See Cachin, as in note 5, p. 170, and
Proust, as in note 5, p. 31.
38 The technical examination of the painting is thoroughly reviewed in Bateau, as in note
5
39. A watercolor in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, was long thought to have been a
preparatory drawing for the Orsay painting. See Rouart and Wildenstein, as in note 9.
However, it is too close to the final version of the painting to have come before it.
Bateau, as in note 5, proposed it may have been done between the Orsay canvas and the
only other related work, a painting presently in the Courtauld Collection, London, that
Manet gave to Hippolyte Lejosne. She also suggested that parts of it may have been
traced from a photograph of the painting due to the stiff and awkward quality of the
outlines of many of the elements in the scene.
Although the Courtauld painting also was once considered a study, it now is widely
believed to be a copy done after the Orsay canvas. This opinion is based on x-rays of
the Orsay picture first published by Bareau. They reveal that Manet made numerous
changes while working on the picture. The Courtauld painting in contrast is set down
without any alterations.
The Courtauld painting is not an exact replica of the Orsay version. The figures are
not in precisely the same positions, the foliage varies, and certain, details are different.
Victorine s right foot, for example, is flatter on the ground and closer to the crotch of
the figure on the right, whose
Z6 PAUL HAYES TUCKER

right hand, on the surface of the painting, touches his companion’s jacket. This figure s
left hand is bent at the wrist, is longer than its counterpart in the Orsay picture, and
holds what seems to be draping gloves, which do not appear in the Paris version. The
position of this figure’s cane is also different; it overlaps his vest as opposed to his
pants. In addition, his head is below the boat in the background. Finally, there are
fewer cherries in the still fife on the left, the silver flask is less prominent, the tree in
the foreground on the right is shorter, and Victorine’s hair is red
Despite their number, these differences are relatively minor. They also are
reasonable if the Courtauld version is understood to be a freehand rendering of the
original. Arguing against the likelihood of it being a study is the fact that it follows the
lines of the Orsay canvas too closely and, most tellingly, contains all of the changes
Manet had devised for that version. On the Courtauld painting as a study see Paul
Jamot, "The First Version of Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’,” Burlington Magazine 58,
no. 339 (June 1931), 299—300; Douglas Cooper, The Courtauld Collection. A
Catalogue and Introduction with a Memoir of Samuel Courtauld by Anthony Blunt
(London: Athlone Press, 1954), no. 32; and Alan Bowness, “A Note on Manet’s
Compositional Difficulties,” Burlington Magazine 103 (June 1961), 276-7 On it as a
copy see Bareau, as in note 5, and Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces:
The Courtauld Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 36.
Henn Loyrette rather ingeniously suggested the Courtauld painting may have been a
canvas in which Manet explored the changes he was contemplating for the Orsay
picture However, he also asserted that the painting could just as easily have come after
the Orsay canvas, believing it more successfully integrates the figures in the landscape.
See Tmterow, as in note 10, p 402
40. For some of these negative criticisms see Ernest Chesneau, “Salon de 1863,” Le
Constitutionnel (May 19, 1863); J. Graham [Arthur Stevens], “Un Etranger au Salon,”
Le- Figaro (July 16, 1863), p. 3; and Adrien Paul, “Salon de 1863: Les Refusés,” Le
Siècle (July 19, 1863), p. 2 Paul in particular referred to the caked or slabbed surfaces
of Manet’s submissions and to the lack of nuances and range of shades; cited
inTinterow, as in note to, p 399, and in Kreil, as in note 7, p. 317. Once again, as Kreil
points out, Manet’s submissions prompted quite a number of positive responses. Even
Stevens, despite his reservations, felt that Manet “will make enormous progress for the
next Salon.” Manet also was not the only artist singled out for criticism. His colleagues
in the Salon des Refusés were the brunt of similar complaints. “Instead of looking for
outlines which the Academy calls drawing,” observed Théopliile Thoré, “instead of
slaving over details which those who admire classic art call finish, these painters
 M AKING SENSE OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE 37

try to create an effect in its striking unity, without bothering about correct lines
or minute details.’’ See W. Bürger, as in note 12, cited and translated in
Hamilton, as in note 7, p. 49.
41 On Giorgione’s picture see Patricia Egan, “Poesia and the ‘Fête Champêtre’,”
Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 302-13; and Schapiro, as in note 15.
42 Manet’s modernist project was first articulated by Meyer Schapiro in
The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly 1 (January-March 1937), 77-
98: reprinted 111 Schapiro, as in note 15, pp. 185-211. It subsequently has been
the subject of numerous studies, the best of which include Clark, Crow. Hanson,
Herbert, and Reff, 1982, as in note 5.
43. On “il faut être de son temps” see Nochhn, as in note 30, pp. 103-78. As one
writer of the period noted, “L’oeuvre du romancier est donc peindre la vie
comme elle est; il serait souverainement immoral et dangereux de la peindre
autrement; ce serait induire en erreur une masse de lecteurs et conseiller
implicitement 1 hypocrisie.” See Antonio Watripqn, “De la moralité en matière
d’art et de littérature,” Le présent (August 16, 1857), p. 246, as quoted in part in
Gabriel "Weisberg, The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830-
1900, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland Museum of Art (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980), p. 125; and in Perutz, as in note 5, p. 210, note 10.
44 Sandblad, as in note 5, was the first to draw attention to the issue of parody in the
Déjeuner, something Nochhn, as in note 5, took up with verve More recently,
this point is made by Cachni, as in note 5, pp. 170-2; and quite differently by
Pointon in this volume.
45. Cachin, as in note 5, p 169, was the first to point out this incongruity.
46 Picasso as quoted in Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
(NewYork' Viking, 1972), p. 16.
----- 2 ANNE MCCAULEY--------------------------------
SEX AND THE SALON
DEFINING ART AND IMMORALITY IN 1863

CC A
1\ history painter takes a nude woman, makes a portrait of her
with a few modifications most often inspired by vague recollections of
the Old Masters, and then says: ‘It’s a Venus!’ Nothing of the sort: it’s a
model and nothing more. These paintings are only académies.”1 With
these words, written in his review of the 1863 Salon, Maxime Du Camp
condemned the false pretensions not of Edouard Manet’s Le Bain (or Le
Déjeuner sur l'herbe, as it is now known), exhibited in the Salon des
Refusés, but of Alexandre Cabanel’s Naissance de Vénus [Birth of
Venus] (Fig. 16) and Paul Baudry’s La Perle et la vague (Fable
persane) [The Pearl and the Wave (Persian Fable)] (Fig. 17). Du
Camp’s comments, like those of many other critics who decried the
overly contemporary hairdos, body types, and alluring glances of nudes
depicted in official Salon paintings, suggest that the current reputation of
Manets Déjeuner as a succès de scandale because of its shocking
combination of two contemporaneously dressed males with two unclad
and unidealized females both simplifies and misrepresents the critical
climate surrounding the T863 exhibitions. By isolating observations by
Salon critics about this painting and by relying on later, primarily Third
Republic, biographies of Manet, art historians have often failed to
register the stylistic clichés and political and aesthetic agendas that
underlay all critical and biographical writing. Furthermore, since the
language of criticism participates in a field of écriture, ranging from
philosophy to jokes, just as the pictorial imagery that it purportedly
explains partakes of all preceding visual imagery, the pub-

3
8
 SEX AND THE SALON
3
9

Figure 16. Alexandre Cabanel. Huth <>/ I hui>, 1X63. Musée d’Orsav. Paris
(Photo R.M.N.)

Figure 17. Paul Baiidry. The Pearl and the Iià iPeraan Fable), r s<>3 Museo
del Prado, Madrid.

hshed responses to Manets painting can be understood only by probing what

concepts such as ideal nude. Venus, and moral art meant to artists, censors,
politicians, and novelists. At the heart of reactions to the double Salon of 1N63 were
current debates over
40 ANNE MCCAULEY
the lines between the aesthetic and the erotic. But underlying all
condemnations of inappropriate pictorial representations were fears of social
contagion, political anarchy, and moral decay that had been triggered by the
Realist movement and the famous literary censorship trials of the 1850s.
That Manet’s three paintings exhibited in the Salon des Refùsés were
discussed at all is a testimony to his already well-established ties to the
world of petty journalists and aspiring littérateurs who generated such
writing by the inch.2 He had admittedly won a third-class medal in the
1861 Salon for his Espagnol jouant de la guitare [Spanish Singer] and
had attracted the attention of the formidable critic Théophile Gautier, but
his presence in the Paris art scene was recent and primarily confined to
the circle around the unconventional poet Charles Baudelaire. As
correspondence among critics and artists confir ms, the production of
Salon criticism was by no means the result of an innocent confrontation
between writer and works, but a negotiated affair of mutual favors,
requests by editors to feature certain artists, solicitations by artists,
submissions of photographs to reviewers before the vernissage, and
carefill concessions to the recipients of imperial patronage. 3 As we shall
see, most of the critics who mentioned Manet favorably had good reason
to do so.
The single greatest determinant of whether or not a critic cited Manet
was whether he or she discussed the controversial Salon des Refusés at
all. Virtually none of the family, ladies, or illustrated magazines did so;
neither did the Catholic press.4 Serious journals such as the Revue des
Deux Mondes, Revue contemporaine, Le Correspondant, and LA Revue
de progrès were also silent on the alternative exhibition. Coverage in the
large Parisian dailies or weeklies was, however, much better. Although
Le Moniteur universel, Le Pays, and Le Temps concentrated on the
official exhibition, Le Siècle, La Patrie, La France, La Gazette de
France, L’Indépendance belge, and Le Constitutionnel cited not only the
Refusés show but also Manet. The art, comic, and entertainment press
was fairly mixed, with Manet cited in Le Théâtre, Le Petit Journal, Le
Figaro, La Vie parisienne, and Le Courrier artistique. The rare journals
that featured discussions of paintings in the Refusés but did not cite
Manet included the Musées des families, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (as
we will see, an interesting omission), L’Opinion nationale, L’Esprit
publique, and the Revue française.3
SEX AND THE S ALON 41
As Alan Kreil has demonstrated, the critical responses in 1863 to
6

Manet’s Dejeuner and his other paintings, when they appeared, were far
from unfavorable. The most commonly lauded aspect was his technique of
paint application, which was hailed as fresh, vigorous, young, lively, and
individualistic. Zacharie Astruc, a Republican painter and critic who by 1863
was friends with the Realist champion Champfleury as well as younger
artists such as Fantin-Latour, Legros, and Manet himself, wrote some of the
most enthusiastic praise in the short-lived journal Le Salon.7 T his journal’s
support for Manet is understandable, since the previous year its publisher,
Cadart, had underwritten the Société des Aquafortistes, of which Manet was
a member.8 Astruc’s defense of the Refusés appeared only in the papers last
issue, published on May 20 after the prefecture of police had closed it down,
ostensibly because the journal was sold near the sales area in the official
Salon. In fact, as Astruc asserted, his journal was being persecuted because
he had criticized Hippolyte Flandrins official portrait of the Emperor in an
earlier issue. His comments on Manet must be seen, then, as a parting shot?
at an oppressive artistic and political establishment, and he paints the artist
as a victimized avant-gardist. Citing Manet’s recent show in Louis Martinets
commercial gallery, Astruc praised the landscape in the Déjeuner as having
“such a youthful and living character that Giorgione seems to have inspired
it.” No mention is made of the paintings puzzling subject. 9
Second to Astruc in his promotion of Manet was Edouard Lockroy,
another young Republican artist and writer who had fought with Garibaldi in
Italy before becoming a war illustrator in the Middle East for Le Monde
illustré and serving as Ernst Renans artist during his researches in the Holy
Land in 1861. Lockroy had just returned to Paris and joined the Saint-
Simonian community at Ménilmontant when he began his journalistic career
and reviewed the Salon for Le Courrier artistique.10 The paper was
predisposed to promote Manet, since it was the house organ for Martinet’s
gallery at 26, boulevard des Italiens, where Manet had exhibited since 1861
and had had a large show in March 1863.11 While humorously noting that
Manet had the talent to displease the jury, Lockroy added that he had many
more abilities: “M. Manet has not said his last word. His paintings, whose
qualities the public can’t appreciate, are full of good intentions. We have no
doubt that M. Manet will over
42 ANNE MCCAULEY
come one day all the obstacles that he meets, and we will be
the first to applaud his success.”12
Continuing the tone of Astruc’s and Lockroy’s pieces, a writer for Le
Petit Journal, using the pseudonym Le Capitaine Pompilius,
characterized Manet as the victim of an unjust jury who possesses
“frankness, conviction, power, universality, that is to say, the stuff of
great art. He sees nature clearly and translates it simply, luminously.” 13
This writer, who may be Baudelaire’s and Courbet’s friend Fernand
Desnoyers (or his brother, Carle),14 asserted that Manet’s Déjeuner
(which he identifies as Baigneuses), with its “male’ and vigorous color,
brings the countryside right onto the Salon wall. Tying the young painter
to the tradition of Goya and Courbet, Desnoyers, like Lockroy, admitted
that only the connoisseur could appreciate this “exceptional sketcher.”
His one caveat was that the work was still only a sketch and that Manet
must develop his powers further.
The qualified comments by Desnoyers find their echoes in mixed
reviews of the Déjeuner by Jules Castagnary, Arthur Stevens, Arthur
Louvet, Adrien Paul, Louis Etienne, and Théophile Thoré. Castagnary, a
long-standing friend of the Realists and of those artists who interpreted
the everyday life of their time, noted the hubbub surrounding Manet’s
works and praised them as good sketches. 15 But he then criticized a
certain flabbiness of painting, a loss of definition in the details of
anatomy, an absence of what he termed “conviction and sincerity.” 16
Arthur Stevens, the brother of the popular Belgian genre painter Alfred
Stevens, writing for Le Figaro, a journal friendly to Manet, praised
Manet’s talents as a colorist but argued that he neglected form, drawing,
and modeling: in the Déjeuner there were vigorous blacks and “air,” but
"relief was absolutely lacking.”17 Thoré, Paul, and Louvet likewise
commended the energetic facture and qualities of color, fight, and air in
the Déjeuners landscape background but found fault with particular
aspects of the painting, such as the evenness of strokes with which all
objects were treated.18 Manet’s “quick and lively manner” also pleased
Etienne, who published a brochure defending the Salon des Refusés.19
These writers, who appreciated Manet’s technique, and many of
those who saw nothing of value in Manet’s submissions, nonetheless
were confused or amused when they confronted his choice of subject m
the Déjeuner. Etienne dubbed the painting a “logogriphe,”
SEX AND THE S ALON 43

or word puzzle, and described its foreground female as “a

Bréda of some sort, as nude as possible, lolling boldly
between two swells dressed to the teeth. I nese two persons
look like high school students (‘collégiens’) on holiday,
committing a great sin to prove their manhood 20 Stevens
likewise apologized that he “could not explain what the
painting was trying to say.”21 Paul described the scene as two
students chatting with “the most vulgar nude woman” who at
first looks as though she’s been robbed of her clothes, but
“no, her clothes are there, two steps from her, and she
doesn’t seem to even think of them. She struts, chatting
calmly about the Closerie de Lilas [a popular dancehall and
restaurant], at which she must be less an ornament than a
fright.”22 For Didier de Mondiaux, the subject was “fairly
scabrous”;23 for Louvet, the foreground woman was
“pointed, angular, without modeling. . .What a strange
fantasy to undress completely the woman who is seated on
the grass and to leave the shift on the one who is batliing.” 24
Thoré found the nude female ugly, the subject “very risqué,”
but reserved his venom for the reclining male on the right
“who doesn’t * even have the idea to take off his horrible
padded hat outdoors . . . it’s the contrast of such an
antipathetic animal to the character of a pastoral scene, with
this undraped bather, that is shocking.”25
Perhaps the critic who was most offended by the indecency of the picture
was Philip Hamerton, an aspiring English painter and etcher writing for the
Fine Arts Quarterly whose sympathies lay with the photographic detail of the
Pre-Raphaelites rather than with the crass realism of the new French school. 26
Recognizing the Déjeuners similarities to Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert,
whose dubious morality he felt was “pardoned for the sake of its fine
colour,” Hamerton found Manet’s “modern French Realism” offensive in its
contemporary dress and situation. In a burst of what might be written off as
Anglo-Saxon puritanism, Hamerton dismissed Manet’s and other Realist
works “in the same class, which lead to the inference that the nude, when
painted by vulgar men, is inevitably indecent.”22
Underlying many responses to Manet’s submissions to the Salon was the
44 ANNE MCCAULEY
belief that the artist had purposefully tried to scandalize the public with his
outlandish color, sloppy finish, and incomprehensible subjects. Ernest
Chesneau remarked that Manet would possess taste “the day he renounces
subjects chosen to scandalize.”28 The
SEX AND THE S ALON 45

implication was, of course, that the critic was onto Manets

game and was not, in fact, outraged. Even though Manet’s
painting showed nude women next to dressed men in a situation
that was certainly foreign to respectable bourgeois behavior, the
figures failure to interact with one another and the women’s lack
of coy gestures and glances did not identify the male viewer as
either a passive voyeur or an active consort. The painting in that
sense remained “chaste,” inspiring laughter perhaps but not
moral offense. The laughter may have hidden a certain anxiety
about the meaning of the picture and its ambiguous sexuality,
but the act of laughing repressed or sublimated sexual tension
and made it unthreatening (one cannot presumably laugh at a
nude woman and feel sexual desire for her at the same time).
Even within the Salon des Refùsés, Manet’s painting was not always
considered the most immoral. That prize was shared with Rodolphe
Julian, a twenty-three-year-old debutant who was a student of Alexandre
Cabanel and Léon Cogniet. Better known today for the long-lived private
painting academy that he founded after the Franco-Prussian War, Julian
exhibited three works, including Le Lever [The Awakening], a view of a
couple greeting the dawn after a night of love. 29 Inspired by Alfred de
Musset’s famous poem Rolla, the painting, like all of Julian’s early
works, has disappeared, but it can be recognized in a caricature of the
Refusés just above Manets Déjeuner (to the left of the foot of the Poli
chinelie judge [Fig. r 8 ] ). Girard de Rialle called it the “succès fou” of
the Refusés and said that it had been rejected because of the eccentric
pose of the woman. Like the figures in Manet’s large painting, Julian’s
were dubbed vulgar: “This woman seems to be dirty; she is covered with
black spots on a skin that is already too dark to be feminine.” 30 Louvet,
who was generally sympathetic to the Refusés, cited “this noisy joke that
draws us to Julian’s The Awakening. I don’t know how to talk about it
with decency.” He added that “the legs, the back, the feet (ah! the feet!),
finally all the hideousness that this Andalusian of the Faubourg-St.
Marceau offers for sale are painted with a hitherto unknown color, and
that we would dub, if you will, the belly of a coalman.” 31 The references
to prostitution and vulgarity that surface in writing on Manet are echoed
here.
Positive comments also mark Julian as someone to watch in the
future. Louis Enault, who didn’t mention Manet, said the public
46 ANNE MCCAULEY

Figure I* Mi. .-!! I. NL<; Jr■ L t .......................

(July IT, 1863),p.275
SEX AND THE S ALON 47
laughed at Julian, but that he perceived the germ of a painter and a
colorist in his work.32 Thoré commented that The Awakening showed a
nude getting up next to a dressed man and that the work, despite its
tasteless composition, was broadly painted from life. 33 Unlike Manet,
however, Julian was willing to compromise with the jury in order to win
acceptance. On April 17 he had written the administration volunteering
to paint a drapery around his female nude to modify her indecency. 34 The
administration apparently ignored tins request, and the work was
relegated to the Salon des Refrisés.
In contrast to the flutter of reproaches inspired by Julian and Manets
mixtures of undressed females and dressed males, the two “official”
Venuses by Cabanel and Landry prompted long-winded discussions of
the immorality of the current age and the inappropriate arousal of sexual
desire in high culture.35 Prior to the public opening of the Salon,
Napoleon III had purchased the Baudry, and the Empress had paid a
reported 40,000 francs for the Cabanel.36 The two painters, both former
Prix de Rome winners, were already identified with the Bonapartist
regime. Attacks on them may be read as indirect stabs at the Emperor
and his court, whose sexual intrigues were avidly discussed at dinner
parties even though they could not surface in the censored press until the
Commune, when they became explicit in countless scurrilous
caricatures.
The overwhelming presence of nude female flesh in the 1863 Salon
struck most critics and visitors, causing Gautier to dub it the “Salon des
Venuses.” As is documented in a two-page caricature by Marcellin in the
June 13 issue of La Vie parisienne (Fig. 19), in addition to Cabanel and
Baudry (see nos. 316 and 91), Amaury-Duval, Meynier, and Briguiboul
submitted Venuses, while Appert, Bouguereau, Lansac, Monvoisin,
Schutzenberger. Mazerolles, Ehrmann, and Blin, among others,
introduced nudes in mythological, bathing, and biblical scenes. Since
most of these genres of painting were high on the academic scale of
importance, reviewers who used subject matter as an organizing
principle started with Cabanel and Baudry and then ranked the other
nudes in descending order of success.
Writers who wanted to stay in the good graces of the court and to
defend the time-honored tradition of the juried Salon accepted Cabanel’s
Birth of Venus and Baudry s The Pearl and the Wave (Persian Fable)
(normally considered a Venus despite its fabricated reference
 SEX AND THE SALON
4
8

Figure 19. Marcellin, Le Salon de 1863 — 4e Série: Les Folichons, from La Vie
parisienne (June 13,1863), p 231.

to an'Orientalist source) as models of feminine beauty and idealized art. The

only debate was over which of these works (or, rarely, the other Venuses in
the Salon) was the more successful The Cabanel was generally acclaimed as
more idealized, better drawn, and more classically “chaste,” whereas the
Baudry was commended for its luscious Venetian color and more unctuous
paint application. Most critics acknowledged that both so-called Venuses were
creatures of love who cast seductive glances. Hamerton, who had chided
Manet for indecency, waxed eloquent over Cabanel s dazzling goddess: “The
form is wildly voluptuous, the utmost extremities participating in a kind of
rhythmical, musical motion. The soft
49 ANNE MCCAULEY
sleepy eyes just opened to the light are beaming with latent
passions; and there is a half childish, half womanly waywardness
in the playful tossing of the white arms.” 37 He did not, however,
condemn this figure. The half-opened eyes also attracted Didier
de Mondiaux, who claimed that they successfully expressed the
idea of the birth of life: Cabanel was a spiritualist, and “one can
look at his Venus without a bad impression.”38
Baudry won the laurels from critics who were more “progressive” —
in their advocacy of color over line — and, in some cases, had even
found value in Manet. Leading the reader through a verbal stroke down
the various parts of the model’s body, Gautier extolled the return of
artists to beauty as their main subject and favored the serpentine line and
“adorable femininity” of Baudry s figure, whose prepubescent smile
contrasted with her body “showing the signs of love.” 39 Astruc added a
footnote to his supplementary issue on the Salon des Refrisés, stating
that he particularly regretted not being able to discuss Baudry s “siren
with a mysterious body whose head beamed and terminated with a
troubling and fantastic twist.”40 The Manet defender Lockroy admired
Baudry s ability to combine individuality with classical beauty and
dubbed him a “modern Athenian.” Unlike Cabanel’s Venus, whom
Lockroy found too clean and pristine, B au dry’s girl was a “pretty,
abandoned child.”41 Tellingly, defenders of both Cabanel and Baudry
projected “childlike” qualities of innocence on the nudes’ expressions
and body types in an effort to argue for the paintings’ morality:42
The most violent criticism of the pronunent display of nudity in the
Salon came from two opposing camps that shared a disapproval of the
Emperor: the first was those Republicans, Orleanists, and liberals who
had been censored during the 1850s and were part of the Bonapartist
opposition; the second was the Catholic right, who felt that the
Emperor’s Italian policy had not been supportive of Pope Pius IX. To
represent the first category, we can return to the Salon criticism of Du
Camp, with which we began this essay. Du Camp, a defender of Realism
and the poetry of industry in 1855 whose journal, Lu Revue de Paris, had
been closed down in December 1856 for publishing the first installments
of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,43 was writing his first Salon criticism for
the Orleanist Revue des Deux Mondes in 1863.44 He rather self-
righteously argued that “one of the first qualities, perhaps the principal,
of art is chastity. Titian’s Venus,
SEX AND THE S ALON 50
Correggio’s Danae, Raphael’s Galatea are chaste They are
goddesses and they have none of the provocations of women.” In
contrast to the Venus de Milo, which is admired first as a form and only
later recognized as a woman, he felt that the nudes of bis day should be
banished to an Oriental harem:
They have nothing to do with our tormented life, where woman has her
great and beautiful function to fulfill. If she’s temptation and
voluptuousness, she’s Delilah and Ornphale. If she’s rewards and shared
duties, she’s the woman of our time. To these Venuses who have been
painted with such ease, we can cry Heine’s anathema ‘‘You are only a
goddess of death,Venus Libertine!” for they are less than courtesans 45
Cabanel’s figure, according to Du Camp, was only a pretext: “His Venus isn’t
being born, she is revealing herself.. . .To justly appreciate this work . . . you
must see it in its true milieu, at a ball, at that moment of intoxication that
music, perfume, and dancing create.” 46 Likewise, Baudry’s The Pearl was not
a real subject: remove the shell * and you have “a woman, and in what a
posture! with what a glance!”47 In conclusion, Du Camp mused that “the nude
ceases to be honest when it is treated in such a way as to intentionally
exaggerate certain forms at the expense of others and is forced to produce an
impression totally different from that of beauty.”48
Similarly, Stevens, Castagnary, and Thoré condemned the official
paintings as immoral. Stevens, echoing Du Camp, wrote that “the morality of
this Salon I find in the success of the Cabanels and Baudrys, and I cry with my
compatriot Shakespeare, ‘Sad! Sad! Sad!’” The Cabanel, he moaned, was not
heroic but erotic art:“one step more and we would fall into works destined to
charm the last days of an old habitué of the Opera or excite the precociousness
of collégiens.”49 Castagnary, a writer opposed to the regime, called Baudrys
work a “Venus of the boudoir . . . the pretty woman with her look of a Parisian
dressmaker would be better on a sofa.” 50 Further associating these Venuses
with prostitution, Thoré proclaimed that nyt only did they lack reality but they
were bloodless phantoms who could be made into “colored lithographs for the
small boudoirs of the rue Breda ”51
Although not writing a Salon review, the philosopher and former political
exile P. J. Proudhon most explicitly associated the
51 ANNE MCCAULEY
eroticism of the 1863 Salon with the social decay that he felt was
encouraged by the Empire. In his posthumously published Du
principe de l’art, in which he defended Courbets anticlerical
Retour de la conférence [Return from the Conference] (a
painting excluded even horn the Refrisés), Proudhon described
his visit to the Salon:
[T]here was in a room, in the place of honor, a figure of a nude
woman [Baudry’s The Pearl] reclining and seen from the back, that I
assumed was a Venus Callipyge. While exhibiting her shoulders,
supple waist, and rich locks, this Venus, by an effort of will, turned
her head to the viewer: blue, naughty eyes like those of Love, a
provocative face, a voluptuous smile. She seemed to say, like the
streetwalkers on the boulevard, do you want to come see me552
This was art that served no uplifting social purpose and could become
moral only by the artist “putting a chancre on the anus to show the
syphilitic outcome of unfettered sexuality. Proudhon felt that the public
should cry out against such licentiousness, but it had lost its wall since
such works sold well. Elite patronage, including that of the Emperor,
who had even purchased a Leda holding a swan between her legs, was
the cause of this decline.53
The Catholic press not only condemned Cabanel and Baudry but
reprimanded critics such as Gautier and Claude Vignon, who had
defended them. Bathild Bouniol, a staunch Bonapartist writing for La
Revue du Monde Catholique in June 1863, was scandalized by the
crowds around the Salon nudes, which even included young ladies with
their mothers as cicerones. 54 In a postscript the next month devoted to
“La Morale de ces messieurs,” this writer chided Gautier for his praise of
the Venuses and even accused Du Camp of hypocrisy in his purported
outrage at the paintings. For the opposition magazine of M. Buloz
(Revue des Deux Mondes) to become a “docteur ès morale” was
surprising, and “gentlemen, excuse me for saying it, but for people who
have pretensions to philosophical gravity you risk seeming to want to
compete with the Guignol theatre with these peculiar parades of virtue.” 55
What this writer found even more astonishing was that the critic Claude
Vignon (a pseudonym for Cadiot, Noémie) in Le Correspondant, “which
the Church counts among its most zealous defenders,” had deigned to
admire Cabanel's work.56
Despite the importance of the female nude in the history of
 SEX AND THE S ALON 5i

Western art and her seeming celebration in classical sculpture, the Catholic press
in 1863 cited a body of archaeological and historical literature which contended
that all depicted nudes aroused desire and were signs of social decadence. Désiré
Laverdant, a former Fourierist who embraced Catholic socialism after 1848, 57 in
Le Mémorial Catholique repeated the familiar association of Cabanels and
Landry's immodest figures with “the most degraded streetwalkers in the heart of
the brothels of Paris, London, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. ,8 Referring to the
writings of Ernest Beulé, Alfred Maury, Prosper Mérimée, Ludovic Vitet, César
Daly, Léon de Laborde, Hyacinthe Husson, Louis de Ronchaud, and others, he
further reminded the reader that “representations of nude women, even in
sculpture, are the sign of decadence in Greek art.” 59 According to a substantial
body of nineteenth-century archaeological literature, archaic and even Periclean
Greek sculpture depicted female goddesses, including Venus, draped. 60 In the
fullest discussion of the evolution of Greek refigion and sculpture, Maury,
extensively cited by Laverdant, traced the degeneration of the cult of Aphrodite
from * the goddess of marriage and chastity into Aphrodite pandémos (lover of
many gods), or Venus vulgivaga in Latin, “the goddess of courtesans, the
personification of the vie galante.”61 Maury also repeated the story that Praxiteles’
celebrated nudes were modeled after famous courtesans. 62 Therefore, for
Laverdant, Second Empire painters were merely repeating the degenerate
practices that marked the decline of Greek civilization in which prostitutes
influenced heads of state and served as models for artists. What was needed was
the substitution of Christian art for these pagan practices and the depiction of the
soul and holy spirit, not just the body.63
Laverdant s position, albeit justified by a large body of scholarly writing
that was itself moralizing, remained unusual in the 1860s. Most critics accepted
the idea that Greek sculpture set an unrivaled standard for ideal beauty and the
“healthy” aesthetic contemplation of the naked body. The very issue of the
differences between Greek and modern attitudes toward the nude had come to
the fore in the 1861 Salon, where Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryné devant le
tribunal [Phryne before the Tribunal] (Fig. 20) was prominently featured. The
painting depicted the climax of the story of the celebrated Greek courtesan
Phryne, who had been accused of impiety by Euthias and had been brought
before the Athenian judges. Her former
52 ANNE MCCAULEY

Figure 20. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryne before the Tribunal, Salon of 1861. Kunsthalle,
Hamburg. (Photo © Elke Walford/Fotowerkstatt Hamburger Kunsthalle)

lover, Hyperides, a noted orator, defended her and, at a crucial moment,

pulled off her veils to reveal her sacred beauty. The judges, thinking they
saw Venus herself, acquitted her.64
Although Gérôme had already achieved wealth and fame for his
small, meticulously finished, neo-Greek scenes, this canvas was
criticized not only for the contemporaneity and ugliness of its female
protaganist but for its unlikely depiction of the figures’ gestures and
expressions.65 As Gautier, Thoré, Claude Vignon, and Léon Lagrange all
observed, the Greeks were accustomed to seeing nude bodies, and that of
Phryne would have inspired only admiration, not the lasciviousness
expressed by Gérôme’s leering old men. 66 Furthermore, Phryne herself
should not have been depicted Indi ng her face with her arms, since she
too would have found nothing indecent in her state of undress.
If there was debate over how a nude in a classical setting should be
depicted, there was even more confusion about how a contemporary
undressed woman should be shown. As A. J. Du Pays com-
 SEX AND THE S ALON 53

merited in his review of the 1863 Salon, ‘‘today we know

what a pretty face, beautiful shoulders, handsome arms, a
pretty figure are; but as a result of the profound difference
between the moeurs of the moderns and those of the people
of antiquity, the beauty of corporeal forms, the science of
the nude have become some sort of mystery into which only
sculptors and painters are initiated.”67 Most writers (except
Laverdant) agreed that the most perfect and, consequently,
chaste rendering of female flesh was the Venus de Milo.
Ever since its arrival in Paris and presentation to King Louis
XVIII in 1821, this statue had had an impact on French
classical studies comparable to that of the Elgin Marbles in
Great Britain. Quatremère de Quincy in April 1821 hailed it
as “a lesson in ideal beauty”;68 Comte de Clarac the same
year pronounced that the statue was not ‘ Venus, goddess of
the pleasures of the senses” but a goddess “reuniting all the
celestial beauties of the soul with all the perfections of the
body.”69 Whereas recent scholars have dated the work to 120
—80 B.C.,70 Quatremère de Quincy associated it with the
studio of Praxiteles, and Clarac placed it older than the
Medici *■ Venus. The mysterious goddess from Milo thus
became archaized and purified, removing it further from the
“degenerate Roman copies” scorned by Quatremère de
Quincy.
Second Empire writers reiterated the breathless praise of the first European
viewers of the Venus de Milo without specifying exactly what features marked
her as an aesthetic ideal.Thoré in 1863 wrote: “One finds with reason that the
Venus de Milo is chaste; she provokes love by feelings of beauty.” 71 Proudhon,
complaining of the lewd stares of the elders in most depictions of the chaste
Suzanna, said such a biblical nude should inspire respect, the way the Venus de
Milo did.72 We can surmise that the oft-noted “chastity' of the statue derived
from her draped lower body; her expressionless, serene face; her missing arms,
wliich left her action to the imagination; and the slightly worn and pocked
surface of the stone, which lacked the slick, sensual finish of neoclassical
sculptures by Canova. Perhaps comparable to Leonardo s Mona Lisa, whose
charm derived from the ambiguities of the facial expression and what the
viewer could not see, the Venus de Milo was (and remains) timeless, unlike any
living woman in costume, body type, or expression.
Beneath the Venus de Milo could be ranked, in clearly definable steps that
varied slightly with each author, a series of nudes that
54 ANNE MCCAULEY
were increasingly less beautifùl, less virginal, and more
contemporary. In a June 1863 column on the latest literary trends,
Alphonse de Pontmartin, a legitimist conservative, recalled that
the Venus de Milo is more chaste than the Venus de Medici, that
the latter is more chaste than Ingres’s The Source, which, in its
turn, is more decent than the Venus of M. Baudry, which is much
less indecent than the statuettes of Pradier, which are less immoral
than the corner photographs.”73 Midway in this list, which
progressed through time and down social classes, were often
inserted the great Venetian Renaissance Venuses of Titian, which
Du Camp deemed chaste but Eugène de Montlaur and Thoré
recognized as more sensual.74 Close to the cloying, mass-produced
statuettes by Pradier and the reprehensible provocation of
paintings in the 1863 Salon would have been placed rococo works
by Boucher, which were mentioned by several critics as frivolous
and erotic.75 Uniformly at the bottom of the scale were the nude
photographs that had begun circulating in Paris in the mid-i8zos
and that suffered not only from the unmediated imperfections of
the bodies of the young models who posed for them but also from
the widespread disdain for the entire medium by the intelligentsia
(Fig. 21).76
These laundry lists of chaste art and appraisals of which bps and hips
were the most beautiful should cause us to question what was really at
stake in art and literary criticism. References to courtesans and
prostitutes — whether as causes of the decay of Greek civilization or as
inappropriate models for Cabanel, Baudry, and Manet - disguised
widespread anxiety over the shifting social status of contemporary
women and the difficulties of reconciling sexuality and public morality.77
As we have also suggested, charges of proliferating immoral art also
implicated the decadent imperial leadership that had encouraged
conspicuous consumption and apparently condoned adultery and lewd
behavior In the early 1860s the hottest amusements were the wild
cancans of Rigolboche, the vaudevilles featuring adulterous wives and
ruthless courtesans by Sardou, Barrière, and Dumas fils, and the carte de
visite portraits commemorating all these performances. 78 Cynically, the
Goncourt brothers in i860 summarized what seemed to be a calculated
SEX AND THE S ALON 55
play by Bona- partist officials: “Pornographic literature does well under
a Low Empire. I remember a couplet inserted by M. Mocquard in The
Wandering Jew that I heard the other night at the Ambigu: the sense
 SEX AND THE SALON
5
6
Figure 21. Pesme, Nude “académie,” c 1862, carte de visite, albumen print from a collodion-
on-glass negative. Private collection, France.

of it was that it’s no longer necessary

to engage in politics, but to amuse
oneself, tell dirty jokes, and have bin.
One tames people, like lions, by
masturbation.”79
At the same tim e, the relation of
art to such a debauched contemporary
scene continued to be contested. In
what critics recognized as a
continuation of the seventeenth-
century debates between the “ancients”
and the “moderns,” journalists,
novelists, and visual artists used the
Salons as a forum for assessing art’s
appropriate subject matter and its
responsibilities to its public.
Implicated in this discussion was the
role of the state as an artistic patron. If
art did not incite the public to
improved moral and civic behavior,
then how could one justify state purchases and subventions? Was it good
enough for art to be only beautiful” form, and did beautiful form necessarily
inspire better citizens?
The critical reactions to Cabanel’s and Baudry’s Venuses and to
 56 ANNE McCAULEY
Manet’s less noticed Déjeuner reveal that whereas writers found it easy to locate
the official female nudes within a tradition of art history, they typically were
groping for precedents for the large Manet canvas.The paintings undressed female
protagonist lacked the idealization of the Venus de Milo, the modesty of the
Medici Venus, the flirtatiousness of the Baudry, the contorted poses of Pradier’s
figurines, and the glossy flatness and small scale of the photographic académie.
The figures, both male and female, were contemporary, but the scenario was
unlike any picnic at Asnières The gestures seemed rhetorical, suggesting dialogue,
but the faces were immobile and stared off in inexplicable directions. The work
was large, approaching the scale of history and mythological paintings, but the
subject was at once a landscape, a genre scene, a pastiche of portraits, and a study
from the nude model
In its illegible narrative and forthright presentation of a potentially
scabrous situation, Manet’s painting recalls the radical style and subject
of the earlier succès de scandale, Madame Bovary. The trial of
Flaubert’s novel in 1857 for outrage to public and religious morality and
good behavior, under the censorship laws that had been reinstated after
Bonaparte’s 1851 coup, centered not so much on the novel’s tale of
adultery and suicide but on Flaubert’s failure to establish a clear
narrative voice that condemned Emma Bovary’s behavior The
prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, argued that the novel undermined Christian
morality and glorified adultery; the defense attorney, Marc Antoine
Sénard, countered that the novel inspired virtue through its horrible
depiction of vice. Recent literary critics have demonstrated that these
two opposing readings of the novel’s intent and relationship to
contemporary fife were conditioned by the disjunctions between
Flaubert’s subject matter and his style, which varied from “objective”
third-person description to quoted dialogue to what has been designated
“free indirect style.” Free indirect style is a narrative technique in which,
according to Stephen Ullman, “reported speech masquerades as
narrative.”80 It uses the third person and narrative, usually past, tense, but
translates the character’s internal thoughts in a way that often confuses
whether the author or the character is speaking.
Although the peculiarities of Flauberts narrative voices were not
noted in the critical responses to the novel when it was pub- fished after
its author’s acquittal in February 1857, the overall effect
 SEX AND THE S ALON 57
of its style and its seeming neutrality were often discussed. Cuvil- lier-
Fleury in the May 1857 Le Journal des Débats commented that Flaubert
put into the novel “as little of himself as possible, neither imagination,
nor emotion, nor morality. No reflection, no commentary; a supreme
indifference to vice and virtue.”81 Flaubert was repeatedly compared to a
photographer who dumbly recorded all the trivial world placed before
him,82 or a surgeon who dissected reality with his scalpel. 83 Both
analogies hinged on the apparent mechanical qualities and lack of human
feeling common to Flaubert’s style, photography, and the newly
professional domain of surgery that critics found revolting and even
fearful.
Despite, or perhaps even because of, the violent reactions to Madame
Bovary, the novel inspired numerous mutators and fueled a debate over the
appropriate role of art as an agent for moral improvement. In 1858 Ernest
Feydeau, a friend of Flauberts whose only previous publications consisted of a
collection of nationalistic poems and a history of ancient funerary practices,
published his first novel, Fanny, another tale of an adulterous relationship
between an *• older married woman with children (in this case a Parisian) and
her vulnerable young lover, whose life revolves around the stolen moments that
the couple passes in his apartment. Justly forgotten today, the novel has none of
Flaubert’s stylistic innovations, but at the time of its appearance it was
considered a successor to the unidealized Realism of Flaubert’s work. The
influential critic Sainte-Beuve praised the novel’s visual imagery and, making
the same allusions to dissection and the camera, compared it to a perfected
instrument that seized and fixed the changing plays of sunlight from fife. 84
Flowever, other critics, including de Pontmartin, continued their attacks on the
invasion of crass materialism and immoral behavior into the arts and even
directly eluded Sainte- Beuve for defending such a work. In a later letter in i860
responding to attacks in Le Moniteur universel, Sainte-Beuve upheld his earlier
judgments as a moral critic and praised Feydeau’s two most recent novels.85
The apparent failure of young writers to have underlying moral principles
prompted Emile Montegut in an essay that appeared in 1861 to warn of the
dangers of a new “scientism.” Wandering through the landscape of life and
stopping before a thousand trivial fragments, an anthill or a mole hole, these
writers in his opinion
58 ANNE MCCAULEY
lacked “a great moral, philosophical, or religious
preoccupation” that would give value to their work. 86 What they
produced seemed to be “notes of a surgery student or minutes of a
clinic course.”87 The important tlnng for Montégut was not to
understand reality scientifically but “to feel it poetically.” 88
Montegut’s comments were echoed in the criticism of Gustave
Merlet, a literature and rhetoric professor at various Parisian lycées
who launched an attack on Realism in the early 1860s. Responding
to the Goncourts’ Ger- minie Lacerteux (1865) and their Idées et
sensations (1866), Merlet compared Realist novelists once again to
photographers:' the moral world doesn’t offer to the photographer
the accidents of the face, color, and line; by preference he is
enclosed in the physical world that is like an immense studio, full
of models that all have equal importance to his eyes.”89
Feydeau s own defense of his writings and that of his friends appeared
as the preface to his novel Un Début à l’opéra, dated April 1863.
Complaining that none of his detractors considered whether or not a book
was well written, Feydeau traced the history of the relation between art
and morality and emphasized that bad characters and licentious situations
were often featured in literary masterpieces. A great artist, he claimed, did
not obey rules but only himself, “his nature, that collection of aptitudes,
tastes, affectations, antipathies, inclinations, qualities, and faults that
constituted his individuality, his temperament, his character.” 90 To the
charge that he was a Realist, Feydeau agreed only if Realism was defined
as “the modern system that consists of painting nature (or humanity) as
one sees it,” rather than the taste for low subjects or the depiction of
nature as it is.91 Novels did not destroy morals, he argued, but rather
contemporary morality, which Feydeau painted as weak and corrupt,
affected morals: “Too many morals in the works; not enough morality in
moeurs” he concluded 92
The exhibition of Manet’s Déjeuner during the heat of these debates
over art and morality was yet another test of the artist’s right to privilege
style over subject matter. Even though his emphatic, broad brushwork and
perspectival distortions were more apparent and personal than the
seemingly invisible, precise verbal notations of Flaubert, Feydeau, and the
Goncourts, Manet’s artificially constructed and pastiched scenario broke
the inherited rules for coherent allegorical compositions and careful
painting, just as
 SEX AND THE S ALON 59

Realist novels mixed dialogue, botanical description, and

snatches of slang conversation. The undressed model recalled
the uncorseted adulteresses and prostitutes of the new fiction
but failed to rest comfortably either in the present-day world
or in the mythological past.93 I he painting, in short, had no
clear subject, and blatantly seemed to flaunt that fact.
The comparisons that a few contemporary critics noted between the
Déjeuner and Giorgione’s works, specifically the Pastoral Concert in the
Louvre now attributed to Titian, reinforce the idea that Manet’s oil was not
about a story but at some level about the act of painting. Certainly the two nude
women and elegantly dressed young men as well as the landscape background
and sensual color prompted this comparison, which was made by Hamerton and
Astruc.94 But these critics, and even Manet himself when he reinterpreted the
scene, may have been aware of Giorgione’s reputation as an artist who was
interested in form and color and not content Francis Haskell, in an article on the
reputation of the Giorgione painting, has posited that it became known as a
subject- r- less scene only after the exhibition of the Déjeuner and Manet and
Zola’s invention of the argument, “forget the subject and its implications.” 93
This interpretation, according to Haskell, was then taken up by Gautier, who
described the Pastoral Concert as "a bizarre composition with an astonishing
intensity of color” and noted the peculiar lack of involvement of the elegantly
dressed gentlemen with the adjacent nudes. Speculating on Giorgione’s
motivations and anchoring him within the art for art’s sake camp, Gautier
observed that
the painter, in this supreme artistic indifference that thinks only of beauty,
has only seen a happy opposition of beautiful fabrics and flesh, and in effect
there is only that .. .The Pastoral Concert doesn’t draw many people [in the
Louvre], but rest assured that those who are looking for the secrets of color
stop in front of it for a long time . . . and make frill sketches and copies that
they keep on their studio walls as the surest color scale an artist can
consult.96
Gautiers reading of Giorgione as a revolutionary painter and his figure
composition as subjecdess was not original, however. It has often been noted
that the Venetian School ever since the writings
6o ANNE MCCAULEY
of Vasari had been conceived as interested in the depiction of nature rather than
religious imagery. Vasari claimed that Giorgione never represented any object
he had not copied from life, 97 an idea repeated in the nineteenth century by
Stendhal, Arsène Houssaye, and Antoine Fleury, among others. 98 The German
scholar Franz Kugler noted that, despite Giorgiones sensitive interpretations of
the real world, his allegorical pictures were “not always understood,” and “it is
difficult, indeed, sometimes to decide whether Giorgione means to represent a
real portrait, or an ideal, or a genre subject, so well did he understand to give
his figures that which especially appealed to the comprehension and sympathies
of his spectators.”99 Alfred Dumesnil, in an article on the artist in L’Artiste in
1853, recalled the Venetian’s passion for music and the fair sex and described
him as a painter “without brakes, without rules : “There are no compositions in
his paintings. There is perhaps disorder in his art, but also the harmony of
nature.”100
In an unusually detailed analysis of Giorgione’s life and work, Dr M
J. Rigollot in 1852 reported the “remark made long ago that because the
subjects of Giorgione’s paintings were most often obscure and difficult to
interpret, their merit is independent from the idea that directed the artist
and consists entirely in the excellence of execution and the power of
talent (or, as Reynolds said, the power of art alone’).” 101 Rigollot cited the
Pastoral Concert as proof of this idea and gave a description of the work
that prefigures those of Manet’s Déjeuner:
A nude woman, seen from behind holding a flute, is seated on the
grass facing two young men in Venetian costume toward whom she
turns. One of them seems to play a lute or perhaps chat with his
neighbor. On the other side of the painting, a woman whose drapery
covers only the bottom of her torso in front of a fountain pours water
with a crystal vase. The scene is set in the middle of a wooden
landscape adorned with buildings [fabriques] and glowing with the
gaiest colors. In the distance a shepherd advances with his troops. One
can’t see the face of the seated woman; that of one of the young men
is covered with such strong shadows that it seems completely black
and one can’t make out anything; the other man’s face is lit only
partially. The body of the woman, of which we can only see the back,
is thickly painted and bloated; her coloring is yellowish olive, which
SEX AND THE S ALON 61
may be the effect of the green of the grass and the leaves that reflect
on her. The peoples expressions are almost null, and in tins
insignificant scene, nothing seems to excite any interest102
Nonetheless, he adds, this painting is precious for its powerful color and daring
chiaroscuro: “The artist is inspired by nature and reproduces the objects that
strike his view with a feeling of truth and rare power” 103
Whether or not Manet consciously identified with the historically crafted
image of Giorgione when he modeled his bathing scene after the Venetians
enigmatic composition cannot be known and is not really necessary for our
argument. Given the topicality of the issue of the artists responsibilities to
contemporary nature and/or morally uplifting idealization, his painting must
have been intended to challenge the conservative public that had filmed over
Flauberts Madame Bovary and even his friend Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mai
(also tried in 1857 'but convicted of obscenity). 104 Manet would have agreed
with Feydeau that the artist has a right to express the world as y he sees it, to be
concerned with style without worrying about how low and ignorant minds
interpret his subject. He certainly could not have been surprised that his
painting, m both style and subject, provoked controversy and was rejected from
the Salon.105
That Manets painting was explicitly about the artists privileged morality
and haughty transcendance of the base thoughts that the masses felt when
confronting the nude body is suggested by his inflections on Giorgione’s
celebrated composition. Giorgione’s nude females, while not responding to the
depicted gentlemen, also do not respond to the viewer; Manet’s model,
Victorine Meurent, pointedly does so through her gaze, but does not show the
gestures of modesty that critics of Gérâmes Phryne had tagged as an
appropriate response for a modern, chaste nude. Manet had dealt with just such
a gesture in his earlier painting of Suzanna, in which the profile model
crouches and covers her breasts while staring out at the viewer, who by
implication becomes one of the voyeuristic elders not depicted within the
painting. By rejecting both the biblical subject and the stereotypical signs of
modesty, Manet in the Déjeuner leaves only two possible interpretations for his
nude: that she is a shameless harlot or that she is an artist’s model posing in an
environment in which sexual desire is presumably left at the studio door.
In contrast to the many stories of painters’ romantic involve-
62 ANNE MCCAULEY
ment with their models (from Vasari’s tales of Raphael and the
Fornarina to Mürger’s Scenes de la vie de Bohème), a second
discourse of equally long lineage emphasized the artist as the
disinterested appraiser of female flesh. For our purposes, the best
exposition of this stereotype can be found in the Goncourts’
Manette Salomon of 1865, in which the authors recount the story of
a nude female model posing before thirty students in Ingres’s studio
who suddenly started and grabbed up her clothes when she saw a
roofer staring at her from a neighboring building. For both the
model and the male student, the studio situation was supposed to act
like a huge dose of saltpeter: “It’s in the pose that the woman is no
longer woman, and for her men are no longer men ” 106 The artist at
work is lost in the contemplation of lines and shadows and, like
Paris judging his three goddesses, apparently deflects his libidinal
instincts into has critical faculties. The experienced model similarly
is supposed to shed her culturally imposed shame with her clothes
and return to an Edemc innocence. As had been metaphorically
represented in Ingres’s, painting of Raphael and the Fornarina, in
which the Renaissance master admires his canvas while ignoring his
flesh- and-blood model and mistress seated on his lap, art overcomes
and surpasses the mundane reality7 of sexual desire.
By staging Victorme as an artist’s model, neither modest nor enticing,
Manet challenges the viewer’s morality. In effect, he is saying, if you find
this woman sexually desirable, you are not identifying with the painter
who saw her as forms and colors. The artist’s morality is asserted as
different from and superior to that of men of the world, an argument that
we today may challenge as yet another artifact of the enlightenment
definition of the aesthetic, but one that Manet’s contemporaries still touted
in defense of their professional autonomy.107
We may, however, probe a bit deeper into Manet’s construction of a
confrontational and peculariarly unseductive female totally unlike those of
Cabanel and Baudry. Victorine as depicted in the Déjeuner may
metaphorically embody the situation of the model in the studio, but
Manet’s stripping off of coded signs of flirtation and his frank rejection of
passive, curvaceous suppleness make her reminiscent of the fearful,
physically repulsive woman that populates countless Realist novels. Emile
Zola, who was soon to become Manet’s friend and defender, in his
autobiographical Les Confessions
SEX AND THE S ALON 63

de Claude introduces a livid, pallid prostitute who at once

disgusts and then seduces and obsesses the young hero. The
Goncourts similarly depict female characters who have secret
sexual appetites (Germinie Lacerteux) and palpitating and
devouring moist flesh (La Fille Elisa) and who destroy their
lovers’ careers (Manette Salomon). This misogyny and
identification of the female as the source of social and
physical contagion is replayed to a certain extent in the lives
of the major Realist writers, which are marked by sexual (or
castration) anxiety and a withdrawal from heterosexual
attachments (the Goncourts, Flaubert, even Baudelaire).108
One could entertain the notion that the artistic depiction of a woman who
bears none of the traditional symbols of desirability 7 and “beauty” at an
unacknowledged, repressed level perhaps reflects a painter’s and writer’s
deep-seated ambivalence about (or even lack of desire for) women. Manet’s
extreme objectification of female flesh, introduced in the Déjeuner and
continued in Olympia, may be more than a manifesto of the Realist’s right to
paint what and how he pleased; it could express Manet’s own inability to
reconcile sexual arousal with bourgeois love.109 What lay at the heart of the
Realist agenda and its negative representations of women during the 1850s and
1860s may have been the obsessive devotion to craft and artistic creativity in
lieu of the formation of more significant physical romantic liaisons

NOTES
1 Maxime Du Camp. “Le Salon de 1863,” La Revue des Deux Mondes (June 15,
1863), pp. 892-3.
2 In addition to the Déjeuner, Manet exhibited Mlle. V . in the Costume of an
Espada and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, as well as three etchings.
3 For evidence of how this journalistic network operated during the Second Empire,
see my Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New
Haven: 1994), pp. 80-5; also see the letters addressed to Théophile Gautier by
artists and critics in his Correspondance générale, Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre,
ed. (Geneva: 1993), vols. 7-8.
4. Among the magazines not discussing individual works in the Salon des Refusés
were L'Illustration, La Semaine des familles, L’Univers illustré, Figaro
programme, Gazette rose, Gazette des dames, Mémorial Catholique, Revue du
Monde Catholique, Journal des arts, des sciences, et des lettres, and Revue du
mois littéraire et artistique.
5. Paul Mantz’s failure to cite Manet in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts was not
64 ANNE MCCAULEY
an accident and represented a personal grudge against the artist. The magazine had actually
been quite sympathetic to Manet: Léon Lagrange had praised his Spanish Singer in his
review of the 1861 Salon (July I, 1861, p. 52), and Philippe Burty had publicized the
Société des Aquafortistes in the February 1, 1863 issue. Mantz came out violently against
Manet in his April 1, 1863 review of the Martinet exhibition, claiming that in contrast to his
earlier promise, the young painter was now on the ‘ route of the impossible” and “we refuse
to follow him” or plead his case before the Salon jury then meeting. Edouard Lockroy
reviewed the Salon for both L’Esprit publique and Le Courrier artistique; he effusively
praised Manet in the Courrier, but did not mention him by name in the other paper. The
critic for L’Optnion nationale, Olivier Merson, was sympathetic to the Refuses and critical
of the current system of state support for the arts but did not want to review individual
works extensively. Louis Enault in La Revue française defended other Refusés artists such
as Mlle. Duckett, Chin- treuil, Fantin-Latour, and Rodolphe Julian.
6. Alan Kreil, “Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe in the Salon des Refusés: A
ReAppraisal,” Art Bulletin 65 (June 1983), 316-20.
7 On Astruc, see Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist and Japoniste
(New York: 1978). Astrucs letters and archives, largely postdating the 1860s,
can be found in the Bibliothèque du Musée du Louvre, Paris, Ms. 420.
8. On this organization and its mandate to foster and sell etchings, see Janine
Bailly-Herzberg, L’Eau-forte de peintre au 19e siècle: La Société des
Aquafortistes, 1862-1867 (Paris: 1972), 2 vols.; and Charles Baudelaire’s
celebrated promotional article, “L’Eau-forte est à la mode,” which appeared in
April 1862 in La Revue anecdotique.
9 Zacharie Astruc, Le Salon (May 20,1863), p. 5.
10. On Lockroy, see his published autobiography, Au hasard de la vie: Notes et
souvenirs (Paris: 1913). Lockroy did sketches and took photographs to assist
Renan in liis researches for La Vie de fésus, published shortly after Renan s
return to Paris; his entry into politics took place only after the fall of the
Second Empire.
11. On the importance of Martinet’s gallery for the development of alternative
exhibition spaces m Paris, see Lome Huston, “Le Salon et les expositions
d’art: réflexions à partir de l’expérience de Louis Martinet (1861—1865),’
Gazette des Beaux-Arts 116 (July—August 1990), 45—50
12. Edouard Lockroy, “L Exposition des Refusés,” Le Courrier artistique (May
16,1863), p 93.
13. “Lettres particulières sur le Salon,” Le Petit Journal (June u, 1863), p. 2.
14. Michael Fried, in Manet’s Modernism (Chicago: 1996), pp. 175-6, identifies
Pompilius as Carie Desnoyers, Fernand’s brother. Pompilius ended his review
with a reference to a fuller article on the Salon that was going to be published
by Fernand Desnoyers in the coming month. No further
SEX AND THE SALON 65

15. article in Lc Petit Journal appeared, but Fernand

Desnoyers published a Salon rexdew (not citing Manet) in
La Chronique illustrée on July 5, 1863 and printed a
separate brochure on Le Salon des Refusés (1863). Since
critics often sold their work to two journals and published
slightly different comments each time (Lockroy, identified
as Edouard and Edmond, reviewed the 1863 Salon tor Le
Courrier artistique and L’Esprit publique), there is no
reason to doubt that the Petit Journal piece was also by
Fernand Desnoyers. Fernand Desnoyers (1828—69) wrote
pantomime plays (two of which featured frontispieces by
Courbet and Alphonse Legros and therefore place him in
the circle around Manet) and edited L’Almanach parisien
during the time that this Salon review was written. His
brother Charles Henry Etienne Edmond Desnoyers de
Biéville (1814-68) was a more successful writer of
vaudeville plays who edited the drama feuilleton for Le
Siècle from 1856 to his death. These men should not be
confused with their contemporary, Louis Desnoyers, also
an editor, theatre and music critic, vaudevillian, and
president of the Société des Gens de Lettres.
16. Arthur Stevens and Arthur Louvet also commented on the "grand tapage autour du
nom de M Manet.” Arthur Stevens, Le Salon de 1863 (Paris: 1866), p. 195,
originally published in Le Figaro; Arthur Louvet,“Exposition des Refùsés,” Le
Théâtre (July 12, 1863), unpaginated Much of this commotion must have been oral,
because the only early press discussions of Manet were those ofAstruc (May 20),
Lockroy (May 16), Monselet (May 24), and Didier de Mondiaux (May 21). Since
most Salon reviewers followed the established hierarchy of artistic genres,
beginning with history and mythological painting and ending with sculpture and
the Refusés, most of the citations of Manets paintings were published in July at the
end of or after the Salon exhibition (w hich ran from May 1 to July 1).
17. Jules Castagnary, Salons, 1857-1870 (Paris: 1892), vol. i,pp. 173-4
18. Stevens, as in note 15, pp. 196—7.
19. Théophile Thoré is well known as a socialist, champion of the Dutch school, and
defender of Realism. His 1863 Salon criticism appeared in Le Temps and
L’Indépendance belge and was reprinted as Salons de W. Burger, 1861 à 1868
(Paris- 1870); see vol. 1, p. 425. Adrien Paul was a playwright who contributed
Salon reviews to the liberal and anticlerical Le Siècle. Salon de 1863 - Les
Refusés” Le Siècle (July 19, 1863), p. 2. Another playwright, Arthur Louvet,
normally wrote theatre criticism. His aesthetic philosophy can be judged by his
1861 book, Le Théâtre en 1861, in winch he defends freedom in art and those
writers who copy nature In his comments on Manet, Louvet referred to other critics
SEX AND THE SALON 66

who had exalted Manet as the painter of the future (no doubt Lockroy and Astruc)
and lowered him to a transitional figure between pure “nullités” and works
affirming respect for art. “Exposition des Refusés,” Le. Théâtre (July 12,1863),
unpaginated.
67 ANNE MCCAULEY
20. Louis Etienne, Le Jury et les exposants — Salon des refusés (Paris: 1863), p.
30.
21. Ibid.
22. Stevens, as in note 15, p. 197.
23. Adrien Paul,“Salon de 1863 — Les Refusés,” Le Siècle (July 19, 1863), p. 2.
24. Didier de Mondiaux, “Salon de 1863 — Les Refusés,” La Patrie (May 21,
1863), p. 2.
25. Arthur Louvet. “Exposition des Refusés, Le Théâtre (July 12, 1863),
unpaginated.
26. Thoré, as in note" 18.
27. Philip Hamerton in his autobiography discusses his conversion to Ruskinian
ideas, marriage to a French woman, and expatriate life in France In 1863
Hamerton was living in Sens and traveling between France and England to
review art exhibitions; his review of the 1863 Salon was his first for the Fine
Arts Quarterly Review. He continued to dislike the crudeness and ugliness of
works by Manet, Millet, and Courbet, which he expressed in his Painting in
France (Boston: 1895). See Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography,
1834-1858, and a Memoir by His Wife, 1858-1894 (London: 1897)
28. Philip Hamerton, “The Salon of 1863,” Fine Arts Quarterly 1 (October 1863),
p. 261. In a subsequent review of “Modern Etching m France,” Flamerton
identified Manet as “the person who painted the indecent picture which I spoke
of when reviewing the refused works at the Salon.” Fine Arts Quarterly 2
(January 1864), p. 99.
29. Ernest Chesneau, L’Art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre
(Paris: 1864), p. 188.
30. Julians other two works were Portrait de M.J. and Portrait.
31. Girard de Rialle, A travers le Salon de 1863 (Pans: 1863), p. 65.
32. Arthur Louvet, “Exposition des Refusés,” Le Théâtre (July 12, 1863),
unpaginated.
33. Louis Enault, “Le Salon de 1863,” La Revue française 5 (1863), 476
34. Thoré, as in note 18.
35. Julian’s letter demonstrates the ways young artists attempted to pull strings to
achieve Salon success and also the ways the jury’s deliberations were leaked
back to artists: “Mme the Duchess of Hamilton had the extreme kindness to
recommend me to you. A life-size painting, drawn from a poem of M. de
Musset, has been refused from the Salon. I learn from a highly commended
member of the jury of the painting section that it was not because of any
consideration of art that my painting was refused, and that if I obtained from
you the authorization to go to the Palais de 1’Industrie to put a drapery on my
painting, which would be submitted for the examination of the jury that has to
meet one last time to judge a statue being repaired, it would have every chance
of being admitted, the jury having found my work very acceptable from the
point
68 ANNE MCCAULEY
36. of view of painting, and the permission to say so having
been given by the person who engaged me to speak to
you.” Archives des Musées Nationaux, Pans, X. 1863.
35 The best discussion to date of the many canvases featuring nude “Venuses” in the
1863 Salon and the theories of female reproduction that underlay their
representation and reception is Jennifer L Shaw, “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of
the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,” Art History 14, no. 4 (December 1991), 540-70.
36 La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité (May 17,1863), p. 229, cited this price. The
actual prices were 20,000 francs for Baudry’s The Pearl and the Wave (Persian
Fable) and 15,000 francs for Cabanel’s Birth of Venus. Archives des Musées
Nationaux, Paris, X. 1863. The paintings may have already been sold to the state
from the artists’ studios. Cabanel’s work was not submitted to the jury until April
10 (he received permission from Nieuwerkerke to do so; see Cabanel’s letter dated
March 24, 1863 in the Archives des Musées Nationaux, Paris, X 1863); he had
invited Théophile Gautier to view the picture in his studio on April 2 (Gautier,
Correspondance générale, vol 8, p. 113). Advance publicity for the two paintings
appeared in L’U- nivers illustré on April 23 (Baudry ’s work was called "une toile
destinée à faire sensation”) and in J. J Guiffrey,” Correspondances particulières,”
Le Journal des Beaux-Ans (April 30, 1863), p. 59. La Gazette de France (May 2,
1863), p. 2, reported that the Emperor had bought the Baudry and the Empress the
Cabanel. Baudry himself wrote to Gautier that the Emperor had bought his Venus
“on the eve of the exhibition” (Correspondance générale, vol. 8, p. 128, letter dated
May 7,1863).
37. Hamerton, as in note 27, pp. 238-9.
38. Didier de Monchaux,“Salon de 1863,” La Patrie (May 16,1863), p 3.
39. Théophile Gautier,“Salon de 1863,” Le. Moniteur universel (June 15,1863),p. ï.
40. Astruc never mentioned Cabanel or any other painters of Venuses in the official
Salon, presumably because his paper was censored so rapidly. Le Salon (May
20,1863), p 6, note.
41. Edouard Lockroy, L’Esprit publique (May 24, 1863), p. 3.Tins criticism was
repeated in his “Dixième lettre d’un éclectique,” Le Courrier artistique (July 5,
1863), p. 12, although his judgment of Cabanel in the June 28 issue had been more
positive. He noted that Cabanel’s Venus was proud of her nudity and had “perfect
plastic beauty,” yet the expression of her head was “totally modern and the smile,
wandering on this partially opened mouth, seemed more that of a Boucher
shepherdess than a goddess of Phidias.” “Neuvième lettre d’un éclectique,” Le
Courrier artistique (June 28,1863), p. 6
42. The prevalence of comparisons of these figures to children suggests that a certain
sublimation may have been occurring; these nudes have all the physical traits of
adults except for pubic hair, which could not be por
SEX AND THE S ALON 69

43. trayed and whose absence might have reinforced at some

unstated level the figures’ readings as prepubescent. The more
slender and smallbreasted body type was also more associated
with youth than it is today. However, since most prostitutes
were in their teens and twenties, as were models for
pornographic photographs, there was certainly no justification
for associating these less fleshy bodies with sexual innocence
during the Second Empire. The fact that Cabanel and Baudry
chose these body types itself suggests that younger girls
represented ideal beauty and were the most sought after for
sexual liaisons.
44. On the involvement of La Revue de Paris with Flaubert, see René Dumesml,
La Publication de Madame Bovary (Amiens. 1928).
45. On the Revues Salon criticism, see Robert de la Sizeranne, “Les Salons,” in
Cent ans de vie française à la Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris: 1929), pp. 309-
34. The journal was counted as part of the opposition and had received several
warnings from the censors after becoming more overtly antiregime in the late
1850s. In 1861 La Revue began attacking the financial dealings of the Empire
and in the spring of 1863 supported the liberal party during the legislative
elections. For more information on the politics and aesthetic stances of the
journal, see Thaddeus E. Du Vai, The Subject of Realism in the Revue des
Deux Mondes (1831-1865) (Philadelphia: 1936); and Gabriel de Broglie,
Histoire politique de la Revue des Deux Mondes de 1829 à 1979 (Paris: c.
1979).
46. Du Camp, as in note 1, p. 902.
47. Ibid., p. 904.
48. Ibid., p. 906
49. Ibid., p. 908.
50. Stevens, as in note 15, pp. 17, 57.
51. Castagnary, as in note 16, p. 113.
52. I here, as in note 18, p. 374. The rue Bréda was notorious for its prostitutes.
53. P. J. Proudhon, ‘ Du principe de Fart et de sa destination sociale,” in C. Bougie
and FL Moysset, eds., Oeuvres complètes (Pans: 1939), vol. 11, p. 207.
53- Ibid., pp. 208—9. Henn de la Madeline also implicated broader social forces in
the decline of contemporary art. He deplored “the narrowness of modern
moeurs, the lowness and vulgarity growing greater each day, the insolent rule
of lucre, and the daily triumph of speculation.” Salon de 1863 (Paris: 1863), p.
4
54- Bathold Bouniol, “L’Amateur au Salon - Critique et Causerie,” La Revue du
Monde catholique (June 10,1863), p. 384.
55 Bathild Bouniol,‘ L Amateur au Salon (post-senptum) - La Morale de ces
messieurs,” La Revue du Monde Catholique (July 10,1863), P- 594-
56. Vignon wrote that the Cabanel was “ideal beauty incarnated in a woman” and
70 ANNE MCCAULEY
ranked his inspiration next to that of Raphael and Correggio. The Baudry was
described as more mortal, with a “plebeian” origin.
SEX AND THE S ALON 71

57. Claude Vignon [Naomie Constant],‘ Salon de 1863,” Le

Correspondant (June 18,1863), p 381; Bouniol, as in note
55, p. 595.
58. Laverdant s aesthetic theories and life are summarized in Neil Me William,
Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830-1850 (Princeton:
1993), pp. 235-8, 242-3,246-51.
58 Désiré Laverdant, “Littérature et Beaux-Arts - Esprit du Salon de 1863 - Bilan de
l’art après dix-huit siècles d’évangélisation, 3e article,” Le Mémorial catholique
(October 1863), p. 395.
59. Désiré Laverdant, “l ittérature et Beaux-Arts - Esprit du Salon de 1863 - Bilan de
l’art après dix-huit siècles d’évangélisation, 4e article,” Le Mémorial catholique
(November 1863), p. 429.
60. Louis de Ronchaud said that drapery was tied to the Greek idea of divinity in his
1861 book on Phidias and in Au Parthénon (Paris: 1886), p. 37-
61. Alfred Maury, Histoire des religions de la Grèce antique (Paris: 1857), vol. 1, pp
486-94
62. Ibid.,p 491.
63. Désiré Laverdant,* Littérature et Beaux-Arts — Esprit du Salon de 1863 - Bilan de
l’art après dix-huit siècles d’évangélisation,” Le Mémorial Catholique (August
1863), pp. 312-15. The political motivations of Laver- dant’s extreme attack on
nudity (he claimed that “nudity, except in children, is not modest” in the October
issue) becomes apparent in the conclusion of his Salon review. He notes that
Cabanel’s and Baudry’s paintings are hung next to Yvon’s battle pictures and then
criticizes rampant Bonapartist militarism as yet another social ill.
64. The exact source that Gérôme used for this story is unknown He could have read
various accounts in the Latin originals or, more likely, consulted recent summaries
such as that found in Pierre Dufour [Paul Lacroix], Histoire de la prostitution chez
tous les peuples du monde depuis l’antiquité la plus reculée jusqu’à nos jours
(Paris 1851); see vol. 1, pp. 140-4, 344-51. The subject had already been treated by
the sculptor James Pradier.
65. Sylvie Aubenas has correctly suggested that the figure of Phryne was in fact
inspired by a Nadar photograph. The gesture of covering the head and the position
of the legs, which were much criticized (see Delaborde, “Le Salon de 1861,” La
Revue des Deux Mondes (June 15,1861), p. 877; and Thoré, as in note 18, p. 16),
represent compositional changes from a preliminary drawing and seem to quote
from an extant Nadar image. As Aubenas noted, a letter from Gérôme to Nadar
alludes to such a photograph after a female model. Sylvie Aubenas, “Musette:
modèle de peintre, modèle de photographe,” unpublished paper presented at the
Musée d’Orsay symposium, “Autour de Nadar: portrait et figure dans la
photographie et les arts visuels,” September 8, 1994. It is known that Gérôme
72 ANNE MCCAULEY
66. used Nadar portraits for his 1861 painting of La Réception
des ambassadeurs de Siam à Fontainebleau par Napoléon
III; for further information on Gérôme and photography, see
my “ the Most Beautiful of Natures Works’: Thomas Eakins’s
Photographic Nudes in Their French and American Contexts,”
in Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, eds., Eakins and the
Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the
Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
(Washington, D C.: 1994), PP- 31-2.
67. Léon Lagrange, “Salon de 1861, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (June 1, 1861), p.
264; Théophile Gautier, Abécédaire du Salon de 1861 (Paris: 1861), p. 178;
Thoré, as in note 18, p. 16; Claude Vignon, ‘ Une Visite au Salon de 1861,” Le
Correspondant (May 1861), p. 158.
68. A. J. Du Pays, “Salon de 1863 - La Mythologie et l’Allégorie,” L’Illustration
(May 30,1863), p. 348.
69. Quatremère de Quincy, “Dissertation sur la statue antique de Vénus découverte
dans File de Milo,” read before the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts on April
21, 1821 and reprinted in Recueil de dissertations archéologiques (Paris:
1836), p 8.
70. Comte de Clarac, Sur la statue antique de Vénus Victrix (Paris: 1821), p, 2.
71. See Alain Pasquier, La Vénus de Milo et les Aphrodites du Louvre (Pans:
1985).
72. Thoré, as in note 18, p. 373.
73. Proudhon, as in note 50, p. 204.
74. Alphonse de Pontmartin, “Semaine littéraire,” La Gazette de France (June
28,1863), p 1
75. Du Camp, as in note 1, p. 902; Thoré, as in note 18, p, 374; Eugène de
Montlaur, L’Ecole française contemporaine - Salon de 1863 (Pans: 1863), p.
29.
76. See Lockroy, Le Courrier artistique (June 28, 1863), p. 6; Paul Mantz, Gazette
des Beaux-Arts (June 1, 1863), p. 484; Obvier Merson, L’Opinion nationale
(June 1,1863), pp. 1—2.
77. On the development of the market in nude photographs, see my Industrial
Madness, as in note 3, Chap. 4: on anti-photographic attitudes during the
Second Empire, see ibid., pp. 223—32.
78. Alam Corbin’s study of nineteenth-century prostitution outlines the more
specific problem of identifying unregistered prostitutes, or insoumises, among
all working-class women in Paris. Women for Elire: Prostitution and Sexuality
in France after 1850 (Cambridge, Mass. : 1990).
79. Some of the most scandalous plays, which often were briefly censored, were
Sardou’s Les Diabies noirs (premiered in 1863), Barrière s Les Filles du
marbre (1853), Dumas fils’s Diane de Lys (1851, first performed in 1853),
Emile Augier and E. Foussier’s Les Lionnes pauvres (1858), Dumas fils’s
SEX AND THE S ALON 73
classic La Dame aux Camélias (1848, first performed in 1852), and his Le
Demi-Monde (1855). Alexandre Comte deWalewski was in charge of the
SEX AND THE SALON
atrical censorship during his tenure as Ministre d'Etat et des Beaux-Arts (1860
—3) ar)d tried to stem the flood of filles perdues on stage When the Ministère
de la Maison de 1'Empereur absorbed the Beaux-Arts on June 23, 1863
Maréchal J. B P. Vaillant took over this responsibility, with Camille Doucet
named director of the administration of theatres. Vaillant on January 6, 1864
declared the freedom of theaters as part of the general reforms of the Liberal
Empire; he was also the minister responsible for the controversial
reorganization of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in November 1863 On theatrical
censorship during the Second Empire, see Victor Hallays-Dabot, La Censure
dramatique de la théâtre: Histoire des vingt dernières années (Pâtis 1871). To
date there has been no comprehensive study of the factors influencing these
ministerial reorganizations and the changes in imperial cultural policies during
this period, the Salon des R efusés, however, was merely the préfiguration of
these liberalizations.
80. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourts: Mémoires de la vie
littéraire (Monaco: 1956), vol 4, p. 51, entry for July 29, i860. This musing was
prompted by the appearance of Ces Dames' Physionomies parisiennes, ornées de
portraits photographiques par Petit et Trinquart (August i860), a book of
biographical notices on famous entertainers accompanied by carte de visite portrait
photographs.
81. On the effect of this style see Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca:
1982), Chap, 6
82. Cuviller-Fleury, “Variétés - Revue littéraire," Le Journal des Débats (May
26,1857), p. 3
83. Cuvilher-Fleury wrote that “M. Flaubert fixed his daguerreotype camera on a
village in Normandy, and the too faithful instrument gave him a certain number of
gray resemblances, portraits, landscapes and small vignettes of an undeniable truth,
of that wan, pale truth that seems to suppress, in its copies of the physical world,
the very light that produced them." Ibid. J. Habans in Le Figaro (June 28, 1857)
also predicted that the followers of Flaubert “would be the invasion in language of
the daguerreotype, under the pretext of naturalism and exactitude " Cited 111 René
Descharmes and René Dumesnil, Autour de Flaubert (Paris: 1912), vol. 1, p. 72.
84. Sainte-Beuve, while defending Flaubert, used the analogy of the scalpel in the
Moniteur universel (May 4, 1857) Granier de Cassagnac in Le Réveil (January 16,
1858) also spoke of dissection (Dumesnil, as in note 43, p. 109), and Gustave
Merlet in a Revue européenne article on “Le Roman physiologique - Madame
Bovary" (June 15, i860, cited in Descharmes and Dumesnil, as in note 82, p. 87)
described how Flaubert’s “scalpel plunges deftly in the palpitating fibers.”
85.Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de lundi, 3rd ed. (Paris: i860), vol. 14, pp 165, 167, June
15, 1858, Sainte-Beuve said that Feydeau “entered in a laboratory, in
72 ANNE MCCAULEY
an anatomy chamber; placed himself at the dissection table, and, under a lamp in the
style of Rembrandt, armed with his scalpel, began to prepare his subject, studying it
in depth and spreading the viscera of its heart before us without pity, in its
hypertrophy or with its polyp
86. “La Morale et 1’Art,” Causeries de lundi, vol. 15, pp. 547-52, February 20,
i860.
87. Emile Montégut, “La Littérature nouvelle - Des caractères du nouveau roman,”
Revue des Deux Mondes (April 15,1861), pp. 1010—II.
88. Ibid., p. 1012.
89. Ibid. Montegut blamed in part the contemporary moral atmosphere for this
decline in taste and also cited the influence of the writings of Hippolyte Taine,
which tied artistic creation to material conditions. Tame s reputation in 1861
was based on his Les Philosophes français du XIXe siècle (1857), his recently
published doctoral thesis on the fables of La Fontaine, and numerous essays
published in Le Journal des Débats and elsewhere. His celebrated Histoire de
la littérature anglaise appeared only in 1864, and his Philosophie de I’art
(based on his 1864 lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts) in 1865.
90. Gustave Merlet, “Les Moralistes de la fantasie — Idées et sensations par MM.
de Goncourt,” Hommes et livres: Causeries morales et littéraires (Paris: 1869),
pp 109-10.
91. Ernest Feydeau, Un Début, à l’opéra, 3rd ed. (Parts* 1864), pp xl-xli.
92. Ibid., p. xliv.
93. Ibid., p. Ixxii. Feydeau continued his attack on press campaigns that decried
immorality in his Du Luxe, des femmes, des moeurs, de la littérature et de la
vertu (Paris: 1866). This publication documents the involvement of the French
Senate in debates over morality and press censorship in 1865 in which
prostitutes took much of the blame for social decay. One bone of contention
was establishing winch social class was responsible: liberals and the
Bonapartist opposition such as Eugène Pelletan insisted that there was an
“aristocracy of vice”; representatives of the government, of course, argued that
contagion came from below. For more on this Senate debate, see my Industrial
Madness, as in note 3, pp. 161—4
94. The inherent danger of any nude women was in fact alluded to during the
Flaubert trial, in which the prosecution charged that Flaubert had broken the
rules of literature: “Art without rule is no longer art; it’s like a woman who
takes off all her clothes. To impose on art the sole role of public decency is not
to subjugate it, but to honor it.” Cited in Dumes- nil, as in note 43, p. 86. This
use of the female nude as a metaphor for unfettered art and, by inference,
unfettered society differs somewhat from the observations of Lynda Nead.
Nead has noted that the nude represents the border between art and obscenity
and that art, or aesthetic contemplation as it was defined during the
enlightenment, is a way of controlling the female body. See Lynda Nead, The
Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: 1992).
SEX AND THE SALON
7
95. Hamerton, as in note 27, p 260; and Astruc, as in note 9. 3
95- Francis Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (New Haven-
1987), pp. 149-50
96. Théophile Gautier, Guide de V amateur au Musée du Louvre (Paris- 1882), pp.
50-1.
97- Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors, and architects, Mrs
Jonathan Foster, trans. (London; 1851), vol. 2, p. 395.
98. Stendhal wrote that the Venetian school impressed the viewer with “the attentive
contemplation of effects of nature and with the almost mechanical and
unreasoned imitation of the scenes with winch it enchants our eyes Histoire de la
peinture en Italie (Paris; i860), p 125. Fleur)’ in Etudes sur la génie des peintres
italiens (Lyon: 1845) said “the Venetians, like the Spanish and Flemish who
imitated them, rarely raised themselves above the reality in front of their eyes” (p.
322) Houssaye in an 1863 article on Giorgione and Titian claimed writers had
traditionally identified Titian as a naturalist but would today call him a realist.
Arsène Houssaye. “Variétés — Giorgione et Titien,” La Presse (May 12,1863), p
1
99 Franz Kugler, The Schools of Painting in Italy, 2nd ed., Lady Eastlake, trans
(London: 1851), vol. 2, pp. 430, 432.
100. Allied Dumesnil, ‘ Le Giorgione” L’Artiste (1853), p. 81
101. Dr. Marcel Jérôme Rigollot, Essai sur le Giorgione (Amiens 1852), p. 16.
102. Ibid., p. 17
103. Ibid., pp 17—18.The similarities between Giorgione and Manet do not end with
these two paintings. Rigollot constructs Giorgione’s life in a way that anticipates
Antonin Proust’s, Tabarant’s, Zola’s, and Duret’s fashioning of Manet’s career
Giorgione is a child genius who had trouble in Bellini’s studio because “the
objects of nature appeared to him under such a striking and new aspect,” just as
Manet broke with his teacher, Couture. Giorgione substituted for his master’s
style “an ardor, a warmth of tone, an audacious use of chiaroscuro that seemed by
far too strange and disorganized” (ibid., p 3). Unlike Manet, however, Giorgione
was reputed as a great romantic lover who died because of the loss of his mistress
See Dumesnil. as in note TOO; Louis Viardot, Wonders of Italian Art (London
1870), p. 193; Abate Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, Thomas
Roscoe, trans. (London 1828), vol. 2, p. 103, for variations on the story of
Giorgione’s death.
104. The Baudelaire volume provides a less fruitful comparison to Manet’s painting
despite the closer personal relationship of the poet and the painter The offensive
poems ultimately censored were more explicit sensual descriptions of sexuality
and lesbianism rather unlike the asexual scene in Manet’s painting. Baudelaire
was ultimately fined 300 francs and his printer and publisher 100 francs each. See
René Jouanne, Baudelaire et Poulet-Malassis. Le Procès des Fleurs du Mal
(Alençon: 1952).
74 ANNE MCCAULEY
105 The usual evidence for Manet’s purported astonishment at the negative
reactions to his paintings is the exchange of letters between him and
Baudelaire in 1865. Manet had written Baudelaire, “J’aurais voulu avoir votre
jugement sur mes tableaux, car tous ces cris agacent, et il est évident qu’il y a
quelqu’un qui se trompe” However. Baudelaire had already learned that bad
publicity was the best friend an author could have. Regarding the pubheation
and trial of Les Fleurs du Mai, he wrote his mother on February 19, 1858: “I
don’t want an honest and vulgar reputation; I want to crush minds, astonish
them hire Byron, Balzac, or Chateaubriand.” An expanded version of the
celebrated volume, printed in an edition of 1,500, was issued in 1861, and the
poet signed a contract with the editor, Hetzel, in 1863 for a tliird edition
(published by Michel Lévy frères only in 1868).
106. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris: 1894), pp. 181—2.
107 Baudelaire used the same argument in his defense of Les Fleurs du Mai. In liis
notes for his lawyer, he wrote: “il y a plusieurs morales. Il y a la morale
positive et pratique à laquelle tout le monde doit obéir. Mais il y a la morale
des arts. Celle-ci est tout autre, et depuis le commencement du monde, les
Arts l’ont bien prouvé” (Oeuvres complètes [Paris: 1980], p. 13 9). This
argument that two types of morality exist and that artists must be judged on
their creative skills anticipates Feydeau’s reasoning.
108. On misogynistic tendencies in Realist fiction, see Danielle Thaler, La
Clinique de I’amour selon les frères Goncourt: peuple, femme, hystérie
(Quebec: 1986); and Chantal Bertrand Jennings, L’Eros et la femme chez
Zola: de la chute au paradis retrouvé (Paris: 1977).
109. Manet, of course, did marry, and from the evidence provided by his letters
during the Franco-Prussian War, seems to have been devoted to his wife,
Suzanne, who was older than he and rather matronly, according to portraits
and the testimony of Berthe Morisot. Nevertheless, he had no children and
continued to five with his mother until his death, probably from syphilis.
Although we do not know if Manet’s syphilis was congenital, we can
speculate that the knowledge that he had this disease may have encouraged
him to associate women with contagion and to have directed what may have
been a sexual interest in attractive Parisiennes into his well-known pictorial
interest in their dress and manners. For a good analysis of Manet’s family life
and its impact on his art, see Nancy Locke’s essay in this volume. However,
given the meager extant biographical information on Manet, posthumous
speculations about his sexuality must remain cautious.
 3 JOHN HOUSE
MANET AND THE
DE-MORALIZED VIEWER

■frly focus in this essay is on the original contexts of the Déjeuner

sur l’herbe' on the contexts and frameworks of reception but also on the
picture’s production. I want to reclaim the possibility of talking about the
artist’s intention — not as the expression of a private, personal vision but in
terms of a calculated intervention into a public forum and a set of public
debates. I shall argue that the picture was a profoundly knowing work, made
with a keen awareness of a wide range of artistic and social issues, and a deeply
intentional and deliberately provocative statement, designed to be seen in a
particular forum, the Paris Salon.
At the outset, 1 want to highlight two points that are central to the writing of
a social history of art as I see it and to the analysis of Manet’s picture.
First, the formal language of a work of art is inseparable from the social
meanings it carries. The rhetorical devices it uses, and the ways in which these
relate to contemporaneous artistic conventions, do not belong to a separate
aesthetic sphere; rather, it is these forms, and the relations they set up with
other works, that generate viewers’ responses to the work. Specifically, in the
context of the Déjeuner, paintings recently shown at the Salon highlight the
frames of reference for Manet’s picture — not only the frames within which the
painting would have been viewed in 1863 but the framing debates in relation to
which Manet well knew that his painting would be judged, these debates were
fundamental to his strategy as he conceived and executed the Déjeuner.

7
5
7( JOHN HOUSE

Second, social histories of art in recent years have tended to look at

broader patterns of social consciousness and anxiety and have too often
ignored the relevance of specific, topical issues, whether in the arena of
social debate or in the more explicitly political sphere. 1 I shall be arguing
that some of the points of reference of Manet’s painting were very
immediate Beyond broad anxieties about modern sexuality and the relation
between city and country, I shall argue that a central element in viewers’
responses to the picture was historically very specific, grounded in a
debate that raged in Paris in i860—i about student morality.

FOR ITS ORIGINAL VIEWERS, Le Bain - to restore the Déjeuners original

title — posed basic problems of classification. It refused to conform to
accepted boundaries, both as a work of fine art and in its imagery. It could
be viewed within a range of different categories, but it consistently flouted
and travestied the defining characteristics of these categories. It was too
big to be a genre painting, too contemporary to be 'a pastoral, too illegible
to be a conversation piece. Its imagery invited comparison with popular
prints, but it was intended for the Salon, and its composition invoked
hallowed Old Master models. Moreover, both subject and composition
engaged the viewer in ways that, in the specific context of its original
appearance, were particularly disconcerting. Each of these issues must now
be explored in turn, but the challenge that the Déjeuner posed derived fiom
their combination.
The first question involves the settings of the picture. This must be
understood in two senses: the setting in which the painting was intended to
be seen — in the Salon, as fine art, and the setting in which the figures are
placed - by a wooded river side and evidently in the present. These two
types of settings gain their point only when taken together: what was a
travesty was the depiction of this risque modern scene as fine art and on a
scale appropriate to significant, ideal art, not everyday genre painting.
Within the sphere of fine art painting, bathing scenes might - rarely - be
very large. Alexandre Antigna’s After the Bath from the 1849 Salon (Fig.
22) measures over 10 feet across. The forms here, unlike Manet’s, are
idealized, and the setting is evidently not contemporary; moreover, there is
a narrative hint in the dog at the bottom right - perhaps a reference to the
Diana and Actaeon story. Even this canvas, though, aroused much
controversy when it was
MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 77

Figure 22. Alexandre Antigna, After the Bath, Salon of 1849. Musée des Beaux-
Arts, Orléans.

exhibited in the Orleans museum during the 1850s, after its purchase by the
State.2 More obvious as a precedent for the scale and shock value of Manet’s
painting is Courbet’s Bathing Women of 1853 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier);
and, like the Déjeuner, Courbet’s canvas lacks an intelligible narrative. Yet, as
we shall see, the two pictures gain their impact by very different means.
The appropriate medium for a scene such as that shown in Manet’s
Déjeuner was not the exhibition picture but the mass- reproduced popular
Lithographs and engravings of the period. Particularly relevant to Manet’s
painting are prints such as Morion’s Oarsmen of the Seine, Port of Call at
Asnières3 and Eugène Guérard s Long Live Wine, Long Live the Fruit Divine
(Fig. 23), both of i860; Guérard s print is part of a series entitled Les
Vacances. Such ‘ permissive” imagery, when presented 111 modern dress, was
acceptable in the semiprivate realm of prints designed for a gentleman s
portfolio, but not in public fine art painting.4
This contrast between high and low is exacerbated by the overt
78 JOHN HOUSE

Figure 23. Eugène Guérard, Long Live Wine, Long Live the Fruit Divine, i860,
lithograph British Museum, London.

references to past art in the Déjeuner. Even if the compositional derivation

from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Judgment of
Paris (Fig. n) was not immediately noted,5 the picture’s subject bore
obvious comparison to the Giorgione/Titian Pastoral Concert (Fig. 8) in
the Louvre, and both subject and figure grouping carried generic
similarities with the fêtes champêtres of Watteau.
What most disturbed the critic and art historian Théophile Thoré in
reviewing the picture was the incompatibility between the subject, with its
echoes of the fête champêtre, and the ugliness of the types; it could have
been redeemed, Thoré said, by giving “elegance and charm” to the
figures.6 Other rev.ewers sensed the incongruities between the
contemporaneity of the picture and its references to traditional imagery:
the critic for La France, the Comte Horace deViel- Castel, described the
picture ironically as a “large paysage historié” and
 MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 79

the male figures as ‘ philosophers,” and Adrien Paul,

writing in Le Siècle, characterized the female figure as a
“shameless naiad.”7
The presence of male figures was also very unusual in fine art genre
paintings of contemporary fife, even in the most innocent domestic scenes, and
was quite unwonted in a context such as Manet’s. Again, I emphasize the
contrast with what was admissible in prints such as those by Morion and
Guérard. Within the sphere of fine art, the boundaries of permissibility were
quite different in scenes in which the subject was distanced from the viewer.
Male figures, often presented in overtly sexualized contexts, were
commonplace provided they were removed in space or time by being located in
the “Orient,” in a historical or mythic past, or in a world of overt fantasy. In the
Salon of 1861, Gérôme’s Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in Aspasia’s House
(Robert A. Isaacson Collection, New York) and Cabanel’s Nymph Carried Off
by a Faun (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille) were both safely across this barrier. 8
The Déjeuner flouted another boundary by placing overtly urban figures in
a seemingly rural setting, thus undermining the stock image of the countryside
as a self-contained, unchanging realm. Courbets Young Ladies on the Banks of
the Seine (Summer) (Fig. 12), shown at the Salon in 1857, was an obvious
precedent. Though at first sight Courbets canvas shows only two women, one
in a state of semiundress, a male presence is hinted at by the presence of a third,
male hat in the moored boat.9
The issues about the relation between city and country were remarkably
exemplified by Auguste Glaize s canvas Misery the Procuress (Fig. 24), shown
at the 1861 Salon, and by the response to it of the writer and critic Maxime Du
Camp. In the Salon catalogue, the picture was accompanied by a brief text:
“Flow many young girls, abandoning work, rush headlong into all the vices that
debauchery brings with it, in order to escape from this specter that seems
always to pursue them ” Image and text together suggest that salvation fies in
the country, in the modest image of the “wise virgins” on the right. It is the
specter of misery or destitution that leads the other young women to go astray,
rushing headlong and half-naked toward the burning city in a chariot driven by
a satanic- lookmg and apparently “Oriental” male figure. The specter here is
encountered in the country, but the chimera the young women are pursuing is a
false image of fortune in the city. Thus, it is the influ-
8o JOHN HOUSE

Figure 24. Auguste Glaize, Misery the Procuress, i860, Salon of 1861. Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Rouen. (Photo Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen,
Photograpliie, Didier Tragin/Catherine Lancien)

encc of the city, the influx of urban ideas, that disrupts the modest living
and restricted horizons of rural life.
At first sight, the focus of the imagery seems rather different in Du
Camp’s review
It is the allegorical representation of what we see every day on our
promenades and in our theatres, the increasing invasion of loose -living
girls who are today a new element in our transitory society, and who, in
the always active and intelligent hands of civilisation are perhaps only
the instruments of equality, designed to make inheritance an illusion or
at least to reduce it to a compulsory circulation. Seeing this
uninterrupted procession of lorcttes (one must call them by their name),
who follow each other ceaselessly among us like the waves of the sea, I
have often asked myself whether the lower classes of our society were
not unknowingly perpetuating the conflict which began at the end of the
last century, and whether they were not peacefully continuing the task
of the most violent clubs of 1793, by producing these beautiful girls
whose mission seemed to be to ruin and cretinise the haute bourgeoisie
and the débris of the nobility.10
The focus here is explicitly political, on class relations in the city, with the
extraordinary lurking biomedical fear of contagion, overtly by heredity but
surely at another level through the ever
 MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 81

present fear of venereal disease, As we shall see, these anxieties had a

sharp topical focus in 1861.
By hitching Ins homily to Glaize s image, Du Camp located the source of
the contagion in the countryside but attributed it to the effects of the
Revolution, which disturbed the “natural order” through the notions of equality
and self-advancement and to the invasion of urban ideas and politics, which in
turn led the young women to seek their fortune in the city, turning a rural
peasantry into an urban proletariat. Glaize’s canvas, by treating misery as an
allegorical figure, perhaps allowed it to be prised apart from politics and
socioeconomic injustice, but in Du Camps text the message was explicitly
political: to preserve the equilibrium of society; the crucial thing was to keep
the countryside free of "politics."
The Déjeuner can readily be interpreted in the terms suggested by Du
Camp’s homily. T he young men may be seen as delinquent members of the
bourgeoisie, and the women, by their conduct, are evidently presented as
immoral - as temptresses or prostitutes, though we cannot tell whether they
originate in city or country. The very casualness of their relationships shows
how deep-seated the contagion is.
This seeming casualness is central to the uncertainties created by the
Dejeuner. The viewer seeks a narrative explanation of the interchange between
the figures, but the grouping denies any clear-cut reading. The gesture of the
figure on the right is unequivocally one of communication, inviting us to
interpret it, but his companions ignore him: the other man stares out past him,
and the woman looks at us. Once again, the oddity is heightened by the
combination of two seemingly incompatible things — the close proximity,
intimacy even, implied by the placing of the figures and the interweaving of
their legs and the scattered directions of their gazes.
In these terms, the illegibility is very different from that in Courbets 1853
Bathing Women. The poses and gestures of Courbets figures clearly suggest
some direct and significant communication between them, but the problem lies
in interpreting their interchange- there is nothing in the picture that enables us
to make sense of it. Moreover, the exaggerated rhetoric of th eir gestures is
quite at odds with the mundaneness of the figures and their situation.11
In the imagery of the period, there was a wide range of ways in which
coherence might be suggested by the groupings and gestures
82 JOHN HOUSE

of figures, ranging from the unobtrusive focused gestures in a

picture such as Alfred Stevens’s Morning in the Country (Fig. 25)
to the exaggerated posturing in Guérard’s Long Live Wine, Long
Live the Fruit Divine (Fig. 23). However, in both the Stevens and
the Guérard, there is a liaison between figure arrangement and
narrative. The criteria for such coherence were well defined by the
Republican critic Jules Castagnary, writing about Manet 111
1869: ‘Tike the characters in a comedy, so in a painting every
figure should be in its place, play its part and so contribute to the
expression of the general idea. Nothing arbitrary and nothing
superfluous, such is the law of every artistic composition." 12 The
scattered focuses of attention in the Déjeuner prevent the viewer
from identifying any “general idea'' in the group.
The confusion is compounded by the still fife, which by Castagnary s
standards is clearly both arbitrary and superfluous: a strange jumble of
clothing and picnic, with a bread roll casually cast on the ground. But this
is not presented in a way that suggests riotous pleasures (contrast the
broken plate and discarded bottle in Guérard’s print); indeed, the
artfulness of this whole arrangement is stressed by the juxtaposition of
cherries and figs — fruit from quite different seasons. 13 And nothing
elsewhere in Manet’s picture speaks of actively disorderly conduct.
The disorder in the Manet fies in the inattention — in the refrisai to
present a coherent interchange between the figures. This is compounded
by a play on authority and gender roles, since this blatant inattention
undermines a male would-be authority figure. The gesture of the man on
the right claims the attention of his companions; both ignore him, and the
woman’s attention is actively distracted.
This distraction, of course, involves the viewer of the picture, who is
clearly implicated by the eye contact of the female figure. This eye
contact is a key element in the Déjeuner; it means that the viewer can in
no way posit his or her standpoint as outside, as an overview. Since the
figures are obviously contemporary and Parisian, we cannot see the scene
as remote in time or space; and the woman’s stare prevents us from seeing
the picture as a hermetically sealed tableau that we can imagine ourselves
as categorically outside. If we engage with her gaze, we can no longer
assume the role of detached analyst or moral judge.
This is not simply because the woman turns toward us but
MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 83

Figure 25. Alfred Stevens,

Morning in the Country, c.
1865. Present whereabouts
unknown.

because of the way in which she looks at us: not shocked or surprised, not shy
or modest, not welcoming or enthusiastic. Our presence is seemingly taken for
granted The obvious contrast here is with standard images that posit the viewer
as voyeur, like Manet s own -1861 Surprised Nymph (Museo Nacional de
Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires), where our looking is unexpected and unwelcome.
Although most bather images do not include a peeping viewer, it was
generally understood that the subject in a sense presupposed some such
observer; the discussion of the bather theme in Pierre Larousse’s Dictionnaire
concludes:
What image could be more graceful than that of a bathing woman,
trembling at being surprised by a prying man, and trying to conceal
the charms that she reveals in her haste. Many painters and
sculptors have treated this theme without any historical concern. 14
84 JOHN HOUSE

One reviewer of the Déjeuner imagined transforming Manet’s bather into

just such a victim, “stripped bare by robbers and seeking to hide amid the
reeds,” and lamented that instead she was just sitting there, seemingly
ignoring the clothes that were lying beside her.15
The distinctiveness of Manet’s treatment becomes clearer by
comparison with another contemporary image of female display,
Gérôme’s Phryne before the Tribunal (Fig. 20), shown at the 1861 Salon.
The story concerns the Athenean courtesan Phryne, who was accused of
impiety for masquerading as Venus; her defense counsel exposed her
body before her judges so as to convince them that her beauty was divine.
In Gérôme’s picture, her eyes are hidden, in order not to see the
viewer/voyeurs looking, but her body is frontally displayed. The viewer of
the picture is more directly implicated by this act of looking than appears
at first sight; the cut-off foot at the lower right shows that the ring of
judges continues around the chamber and embraces our viewpoint
In two ways this treatment is quite unlike that in the Déjeuner;
Manet’s female figure is quite unashamed, but at the same time her body
is presented in a way that rejects all the rhetoric of display so
characteristic of the image of the female nude at the Salon, In these terms,
she reveals little to the viewer/voyeur, but equally she is emphasized as
naked, self-awarely but not self-consciously.
The distinctiveness of the woman’s gaze in the Déjeuner is
highlighted by comparison with Tissot s Partie carrée (private collection),
exhibited at the Salon in 1870. The general idea of this canvas evidently
derives from Manet’s Déjeuner; but it offers just the sort of anecdotal
narrative closures that the Déjeuner denies. This is openly a scene of
sexual flirtation, and the woman on the left looks at us with an amused
complicity. But we, the viewers of the picture, as opposed to the scene,
are distanced through the scene being set m historical dress of the
Directory period.16
r
he relevance of Tissot s theme to Manet’s was emphasized by the fact
that in 1871, when memories of the Tissot would have been fresh, Manet
gave the Déjeuner the title Partie carrée in an inventory; by contemporary
definition, as Alan Kreil has recently noted, a partie carrée was “a four-
way debauch, involving two men and two girls, who sleep together, go for
walks together, eat together, and kiss.”17
MANET AND THE DE-MOR ALIZED VIEWER 85

Manet set up a particularly problematic relationship between the picture and

its original viewers in Paris in 1863 by denying the viewer any of the
conventional means of establishing a categorical distance between viewing the
picture and viewing the scene it depicts. This is partly through the direct glance
of this figure but also because, in contemporary social terms, many of the points
of reference of the subject were topical and controversial.
In a number of the reviews the figures in the Déjeuner are characterized.'! he
woman in the foreground, not surprisingly, is called a bréda (by Louis Etienne)
— a low prostitute. The men appear once as ‘ philosophers (Viel-Castel),
presumably an ironic reference to bohemianism; once as gandins (Etienne) —
young men of fashion but doubtful morals; but they also appear twice as
étudiants (Ernest Chesneau, Paul); and, startlingly, once as collégiens (Etienne)
high school kids.18
These designations are not all simply stock epithets The identification of the
men as students, seemingly rather more surprising, is very specific in its
reference. The context of this was a debate that broke out 111 i860 about the
morality of the student population (the male student population, of course) in the
Quartier Latin. It was precipitated by an anonymous pamphlet, apparently by the
journalist Noel Picard, in which he alleged, with salacious glee, that the well-
brought-up, innocent sons of the bourgeoisie were being corrupted as soon as
they reached Paris by the night fife and the demimondaines of the left bank. 19 In
a flurry of responses, again in anonymous or pseudonymous pamphlets, voices
sprang up to insist that Picard’s account was grossly exaggerated and that, in its
prurient details, it acted as an advertisement for the prostitutes of the Quartier
Latin. Most students, it was argued, were respectable and hardworking and a
worthy focus for the country’s hopes for the future. Not surprisingly, given the
mascuhnist terms of the discourse, there was less defense of the women. All that
was said on their behalf was that there were still a few good-hearted girls -
survivals of the legendary grisette - who were interested in students for their
charm, not their money.20
This debate attracted widespread attention in 1860-1, becoming a major
focus for the litanies of moral fear that were part of the under intellectual
climate of the early 1860s — litanies 01 which Du Camp’s responses to Glaize’s
Misery the Procuress were so clearly a
86 JOHN HOUSE

part. Picard’s seeming case histories were seen as proof of the

creeping degeneration attacking the upper classes in French
society — as proof of the legitimacy of Du Camp’s fears,21
Such anxieties, and arguably these specific debates, were central to
the acute moral discomfort that greeted Manet’s painting in 1863. The
male viewer found himself plunged into the middle of one of Picard’s
scenarios, as a participant on equal terms with the men in the scene. For a
female viewer, the impheations would have been still more disturbing, a
woman so readily accepted as she entered the glade could be no more
respectable than the women she saw there.
But did these issues play a central part in the conception of Manet’s
painting? Were these references encoded in the ways in which he
presented his subject? I would emphasize the topicality of the issues and
Manet’s obvious alertness to the complexities of debate about life in
modern Pans. And there is one jokey detail in the picture that shows just
how topical its references were and suggests that debates such as that
about student morality were central to Manet’s project. This is the frog in
the lower left corner — small but unequivocal. It cannot simply be
explained away as a colored accent, a tache, for it is clearly green and
placed against green grass. It has been pointed out before that grenouille
(frog) was Parisian slang for prostitute; but more specifically, one source
tells us, it was student slang. 22 This solemn little attendant sits below the
naked woman and can be seen in a sense as her attribute. Most viewers
would have missed the detail, and many more would have missed the
reference; but this is one of the signs in Manet’s art that cannot be
arbitrary;

THE TRANSGRESSIVENESS of Manet’s Déjeuner is best understood in

terms of the boundaries it flouted: between the genres in painting,
between the forms of high art and the imagery of popular culture,
between the normative notions of city and country, and between the
world within the painting and the world of the viewer. But the force of
these transgressions was best expressed by the oft-reported response of
viewers to the Salon des Refusés and to Manet’s painting in particular:
laughter.
When the painting put in a scarcely veiled appearance in Zola’s novel
L’Oeuvre in 1886, this laughter was presented partly as a mark
 MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 87

of the artist’s incomplete realization, partly as a reflection of the audience’s

philistinism. But it is better understood as a marker of the Déjeuners
transgressions, for no response could have been less appropriate th an laughter
within the realm of fine art and high culture that the Salon represented. As Linda
Nochlin has suggested, the painting demands to be viewed in terms of the notion
of the blague — the sort of joke or parody that the Goncourt brothers in
Manette Salomon described as a key symptom of the degeneracy of modern
civilization:
It has become the farcical credo of scepticism, the Parisian revolt of
disillusion, . . . the great modern form, impious and carniva- lesque. . . . The
Blague, this terrifying laughter, enraged, feverish, evil, almost diabolical,
that comes from spoiled children, from the rotten children of the dotage of a
civilisation... ,23
Whatever Manet’s intention, the effect of his painting was to introduce the
blague and the carnivalesque into the Salon; given his acute awareness of the
politics and poetics of the art world, this can hardly have been accidental.24

NOTES

For contemporary press criticism of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, I am indebted to

George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven: 1954): Alan Kreil.
“Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe in the Salon des Refusés: A Re-appraisal,” Art
Bulletin 65 flu ne 1983), 316-20; and Eric Darragon, Manet (Paris:
1989).Translations aie by the author
1. For analyses of Manet’s work that do focus on specific political contexts, see, for
example,John Hutton, “The Clown at the Ball: Manets Masked Ball at the Opera and
the Collapse of Monarchism in the Early Third Republic,” Oxford Art Journal 10, no
2 (1987), 76-94: Jane Mayo Roos, “Within the ‘Zone of Silence’ Monet and Manet
in 1878, Art History 11, no. 2 (September 1988), 374-409; Philip Nord, “Manet and
Radical Politics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 3 (Winter 1989), 447
—80.
2 See Jean-Pierre Alexandre Antigua, exhibition catalogue (Musée des Beaux-Arts
d’Orléans, 1978-9), catalogue no. z, n. p,
3. We are indebted to Beatrice Farwell’s researches for our knowledge of this repertoire
of imagery. Morion’s print is reproduced in The Cult of Images: Baudelaire and the
19th-Century Media Explosion, exhibition catalogue by Beatrice Farwell and others
(UCSB Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1977), p 72.
88 JOHN HOUSE

4. For further discussion of these issues, see Anne McCauley’s essay in this
volume.
5 It was first cited in the book version of Chesneau’s 1863 review, L' Art et les
artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris: 1864), pp. 188—9; see
Hamilton, as in note 1, p. 44.
6. Théophile Thoré, Salons de W. Bürger, 1861 à 1868 (Paris: 1870), T, p. 425.
7 Horace de Viel-Castel, “Le Salon de 1863,” La France (May 21, 1863),
quoted in Darragon, as in unnumbered opening note, p. 87; Adrien Paul,
“Salon de 1863 Les Refusés,” Le Siècle (July 19, 1863), quoted in Kreil, as in
unnumbered opening note, p. 317.
8. For Gérôme’s canvas, see Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-
Léon Gérôme (London and New York: 1986), pp 57, 210; for Cabanel s
picture, bought by the Emperor Napoleon III, see The Second Empire,
exhibition catalogue (Philadelphia Museum, of Art, 1978), pp. 263—4.
9. On the critical response to Courbet’s painting, see Courbet Reconsidered,
exhibition catalogue by Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin (Brooklyn Museum,
1988), pp 133—4
10 Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon de 1861 (Paris' 1861), pp 136—7.
11.Delacroix provided the most perceptive response to the problems that
Courbet’s picture posed: “What a picture! what a subject! The vulgarity of the
forms would not matter; it is the vulgarity and uselessness of the idea that are
abominable; and . . . if only that idea, such as it is, was clear 1 What do these
two figures mean? . . . (The standing woman] makes a gesture that expresses
nothing. . . . There is some exchange of thought between the figures, but it is
incomprehensible.” (Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed.A.Joubin [Paris- 1980],
pp 327-8, entry for April 15,1853.)
12.Jules Castagnary ‘ Salon de 1869,” reprinted in Salons (1857-1879) (Paris:
1892), vol. I, pp. 364-5.
13 See, e g., Manet, exhibition catalogue (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York: 1983), p. 169.
14.Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris:
1867), vol. II, p. 57.
15. Paul, as in note 7.
16.For Tissot s canvas, see Christopher Wood, Tissot (London: 1986). p 47; for a
recent discussion of the immoral reputation of the Directory, see Susan L.
Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly Modern Life in Napoleonic France
(New Haven and London: 1995), pp. 57IF.
17.See Alan Kreil, Manet (London: 1996), pp. 32-3, who quotes the
Dictionnaire érotique moderne of 1864.
18 Louis Etienne, Le Jury et les exposants (Paris: 1863), pp. 29-30, quoted in
Darragon, as in unnumbered opening note, p. 86; de Viel-Castel, as in note 7;
Ernest Chesneau, “Le Salon de 1863,” Le Constitutionnel (May 19,
 MANET AND THE DE-MORAL1ZED VIEWER 89

1863), quoted in Darragon, as in unnumbered opening note,

p 85; Paul, as in note 7.
19 Les Etudiants et les femmes du Quartier Latin en i860 (Paris: i860); the author is
identified as Noel Picard in another pamphlet by Picard, Les Lions de Province
(Paris: 1861).
20. For responses that defended the morality of male students, see Anon., Vive l’étudiant
(Paris: i860); O. Mounpais, Aux vrais étudiants: Guerre! Guerre! à la brochure Les
Etudiants et les femmes du Quartier Latin en i860 (Paris: i860) (see pp. 40—2 on the
grisette). More equivocal were two other responses to the original pamphlet: Anon.,
Le Quartier Latin (Paris: 1861); and Un Etudiant en droit. Sus aux gandins! Sus aux
biches! à propos de la brochure Les Etudiants et les femmes du Quartier Latin
(Paris: i860). The whole debate coincided va th the controversy aroused by the so-
called Mémoires of the prostitute Rigolboche.
21. On these fears, viewed from two very different perspectives, see Jennifer L Shaw,
“The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,” Art History 14,
no 4 (December 1991), 540-57; and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness:
Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven and London: 1994),
Chap. 4.
22 “Murger’s grisettes, abandoning their independence and their gaiety, have become,
according to the term used by students, grenouilles de brasseries”; Macé, quoted in
J. P. Colin and J. P. Mével, Larousse, Dictionnaire de Vargot (Paris: 1992), p 317.
23. Edouard and Jules de Concourt, Manette Salomon, first published 1867, new ed.,
Paris, 1979, pp, 42-3; see Linda Nochlin, “The Invention of the Avant-Garde,” in
The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York:
1989), pp. 13—14.
24. This assessment is informed by P. Stallybrass and A Wright, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression (London: 1986).
 4 CAROL ARMSTRONG
TO PAINT, TO POINT,
TO POSE
MANET’S EE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

We are in the painter’s studio. A model is posing. The painter

has asked her to replicate a pose from an old Venetian Renaissance
painting in the Louvre. The model takes up the pose hut alters it a little,
at the painter’s suggestion. She attempts to get comfortable, propping
her elbow on her knee in an effort to stay still while the painter paints
her. She looks out at him, and at us, the visitors to the studio — where
else should she look while she holds her pose? She keeps one bit of cloth
underneath her backside to soften the hard floor beneath her somewhat,
but the rest of her clothes lie discarded next to her, along with an artfully
disarranged painter’s still life of basket, brioche, peaches, cherries, and
oysters — this painter, she knows, likes to paint live models together with
still If es. He likes to have them both in front of him in the studio, so that
he may judge them against each other while they are both, model and
still life, under his gaze at once. Behind the model the painter has
provisionally propped up some painted stage scenery in order to get the
effect of the outdoors, indoors here in the studio. Everyone present — the
model, the painter, and the visitors — shares in an open acknowledgment
that this is a professional scene: a professional exchange between
painter, model, and spectator.
Two of the visitors to the painter’s studio are family: one is a brother
of the painter; the other is the painter’s soon-to-be brother-in-law, who
also happens to be an artist — a young Dutch sculptor. Since they are
there, the painter asks them to model too - they come cheap, after all;
they can be expected to put up with their brother’s foibles; and they, like
the professional model, also know how much their brother the painter
likes to have models under his gaze, how much he likes to turn

90
 4 CAROL ARMSTRONG
everything under his gaze into models for painting. They, in contrast to
the undressed figure next to them,

91
 TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

are not professional models, and they do not get undressed. The studio is
not so warm, the bare floor is not so comfortable against naked flesh,
and they have not been paid to take their clothes off — and, anyway, the
men in the Renaissance painting they are asked to replicate have kept
their clothes on.
The painter changes his mind a bit, unable to decide whether he wants to
paint a modern fête champêtre or an updated judgment of Paris. He has a print
after another Renaissance image lying around, and on a whim he asks his
brother to replicate one of its poses - he likes it — why not combine two old
images in one modern one? — he’s done that sort of thing before. The brother’s
pose is a little more difficult than that of the professional model, but unlike the
model, who has to stay put, he will come and go (the painter’s other brother
may even sit in for him now and then and act as a sort of place marker). In fact,
not only does he remain in his street clothes, he will never actually put down his
cane, which happens R serve equally well as a studio prop, something to curl
his fingers around while he , takes up his uncomfortable lounging, lifted-arm
pose. The painter is happy with it — for he discovers that in taking up that pose
his brother can be painted pointing at the model, keeping everyone’s gaze
directed at her and s' her professional look.
The model is posing. The brother is pointing. And the painter is painting.
He works hard at the contrast between the model’s naked white flesh and the
black of the men’s frock coats; he lays the paint on and smooths it over to get a
stark, black-and-white contrast. He works hard on his brother’s hovering arm
and hand and on the stark effect of the model’s gaze. He searches for just the
right color for her hair, almost as dark as the men’s coats, yet with a touch of
warmth to match the live tints of her face and to catch a suggestion of Titian
red. And he works hard on the background, brushing in some russet and green
quickly so as to keep the feeling of painted theatrical sets to contrast with his
harder rendering of the models’ bodies, to keep the process of painting before
his and our eyes, with just a touch of reminiscence of the open-air quality of the
picnic along the Seine that he thinks first inspired him - not enough, however, to
spoil the effect of the studio that he wishes to maintain.
Remembering some other rococo fêtes champêtres, the painter hits on the
idea of sketching in a bent-over female figure in her shift in the middle ground,
lifting her straight from Watteau and rendering her with an appropriately light-
handed touch. Yes, that almost finishes it - she makes a nice contrast in every
way to the harder, more finished look of his outwardly staring professional
model. She’s a nice demonstration of the different ways a
92. CAROL ARMSTRONG

woman can look to the painter’s gaze and of the different ways a painter can
paint, catching different manners from the painting of the past, arriving at
differen t painterly effects. And if he wants to, he can get his model to take up
that other pose another time, just to check it against life. On the other
hand,perhaps he won’t: it might be enough merely to hint that it’s the same
woman seen twice, and leave it at that. It occurs to him that he just might want
to keep the contrast he’s got now between art and life, the quick sketch and the
slow, vivid, compelling gaze, the unfinished rendition and the finished personal
presence. IJ he goes back to the bent-over woman in the middle ground and
works her over, if he checks her against the model, he just might lose that. He’ll
wait and see when he’s done.
The painter turns to the still life in the foreground and labors at
getting it right, brushing on some icy blue, some gray-green, some black
and straw and peach and red, picking up the model’s warm-cold effect,
enhancing and framing her with that still life. The painter worries over
the still life - it’s the key to the whole, perhaps. He dabs the small patches
of dark red that are becoming cherries with tiny white highlights to make
them look real and yet still painted — to show how a painter paints an
illusion. His glance returns to his brother’s pointing index finger and
then to his model’s gaze and stays riveted there, commanded by it.

IN THIS IMAGINING of the scene of Manets studio, what is true

and what is false? Weil, it is just that, an imagining, not a historical
reconstruction — I rather doubt, for instance, that Manet actually set up
some stage sets to make a background for his painting, even though the
background has the look of painted flats. Nonetheless, I believe the
foregoing is an imagining solicited by the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which I
want to describe as a not-very-veiled evocation of the painters world of
the studio,1 replete with the model and her discarded clothes, a still-life
arrangement, accouterments and props, and family visitors, together with
a demonstration of painterly quotations and manners and of the workings
of illusionism, as well as a deictic gesture pointing to it all - rather than
an image of contemporary social mores and sexual practices associated
with the banks of the Seine at Bougival, Argenteuil, or the Bois de
Boulogne. It is also, I think, an imagining borne out by some of the facts.
And what are the salient facts? To start, they concern the players
 TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

in the painterly drama of 1863. First, there was Manet

himself, who we know had an inordinate liking - indeed, need - for
the live model, and who was wont to pair live model with still-hfe
arrangement, which he also needed to have in front of him as a
means both of color composition and of adjudication of illusionistic
effect. (I am thinking in particular here of Théodore Duret s
anecdote concerning his own sitting of several years later, in which
Manet placed next to him at the last moment a book and a still-hfe
tray with a lemon, a spoon, a water carafe, and a glass on it,
suddenly enabling him to finish his painting. 2) Second, there was
Vic- torine Meurent, who was the model to whom I have been
referring - and whose features appear repeatedly and recognizably, if
also changeably, in painting after painting of Manet’s between 1862
and 1866: in the sixties Manet painted her more often than anyone
else, including Léon Leenhoff, who was the illegitimate son of one
of the men in the Manet family,3 and who as a model came in a close
second to Victonne. In all of those paintings, to which I will return
in a moment,Victorine s status as painters model is dramatized over
and over again by her overt adoption of poses, her wearing of
costumes, her enactment of scenes from the museum with and
without walls — her replication of scenes from paintings from the
past found in the Louvre and other collections, and in reproduction,
and her dead-pan models stare 4
Then there was Ferdinand Leenhoff, the sculptor brother of Manets soon-
to-be-wife Suzanne, who posed for the male figure seated next to Victorine.
And there was Eugène and Gustave Manet, Manets brothers, who, it is said,
alternated as the model for the male figure at the right, the one who points at
Victorine. We know also that Gustave Manet sat at least one other time for
Manet that year, posing in costume as a majo just as overtly as Victorine had
posed as an espada the year before. That painting of Gustave, which makes no
more pretense of being anytliing other than a pictor ial performance than Mlle.
V... in the Costume of an Espada does, showed up at the Salon des Refusés
together with the Déjeuner, as if to draw a double line under the presence of
the posing brother and his connection to the posing Mlle. V in that open-air
luncheon scene.
Then there is the date - 1863: not only was this the year Manet married
Suzanne Leenhoff, it was also the year he painted Victorine as Olympia (Fig.
15), taking up the pose of Titians Venus of
94. CAROL ARMSTRONG

Urbino (Ufizzi, Florence), which he had copied earlier in

Florence. The two paintings, though shown at different times,
need to be considered together - for they belong to a series of
pairs comparing and contrasting the features of Victorine in and
out of art historical guise, more or less absorbed into her art-
historical role, more or less overtly announcing her status as
painter’s model." hen there is the well-known array of sources for
the Déjeuner — ranging from Giorgione/Titian to
Raimondi/Raphael to Watteau, not to mention Achille Devéria
and others, and making of this painting perhaps the most
concentrated exercise in eclectic quotation since The Old
Musician (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) of i860,5
and one whose prime art-historical reference was more
recognizable to Manets public than that of Olympia would be two
years later — no doubt simply because it was located closer to
home, in the Louvre.6 This array of sources makes of the
Déjeuner an even more sustained demonstration than Manets
other early work of what it means to paint in the age of the
museum and the mechanical reproduction, with its privileging of
the exhibition value of the art-historical image.7 (Working from
prints as he often did to produce his “original” works, and then
reproducing those same “original” works in print form many
times over, Manet was perhaps more involved in this
demonstration — of the way the museum and the mechanical
reproduction work hand-in-glove — than any other painter offris
generation.)
Then, last but not least — it is what I have been speaking of all along
- there is the painting itself. Surely the painting itself is the “primary
text” with which we are confronted. Surely, if all the texts and events that
surround it can serve as external evidence of its context and reception,
the painting per se offers its own kind of internal evidence, not so much
of the world around it but of itself. And that internal evidence consists of
its outward-staring model, its framing of her gaze with an empty deictic
gesture, its supplementation of her flatly naked body with its richly
painted still life, the unconvincing plein-airism of its background, the
nonsense it makes of its updating of a Venetian Renaissance idyll, and its
comparison of two facturai manners associated with two views of a
woman — the hard, flat, harsh constrast and thingy quality of Victorine
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

and her black-attired male companions versus the caressive, light, and
brushy rococo rendering of the Watteau-inspired figure in her shift
96. CAROL ARMSTRONG

amid the forest, the latter’s retreating, folded-over, barely

there body attached to the background’s visible
demonstration of the process of painting rather than to the
painter’s freshly finished products (as seen in the figures and
objects of the foreground - particularly the rather
unpleasurably rendered body of Victorine). That is the
internal evidence of the Déjeuner: one of the things it speaks
to is the fact that the painting is precisely not synonomous
with the world around it — to the fact not of its autonomy
but of its difference from the world it depicts.8

1862 and 1866- FOUR PICTURES OF VICTORINE

Always we come back, directed by that pointing index finger, to
Victorine Meurent, as perhaps the salient fact of this painting and of the pair
and the series to which it belongs The year before, when ' Manet first began
using her as his model, he painted her three times, first as herself, then as a
street singer, and finally as an espada. The little portrait of 1862 (Fig. 26),
with the stark, stripped-naked, strangely bleached look of its face, the
unprecedented harshness of its black-and-white contrasts, and the peculiar,
off-key melange of its icy blues and warm russets stands as testimony of the
fascination that Victorine’s features appear to have held for the painter
The other two paintings (Figs. 27 and 10), however, stand as a more
complex pair. The puzzle of the pair is, what defines the identity, what
constitutes the true “nature” of a woman who is a painter’s model?
Between one and the other, Victorine appears in costume that is
alternately close to and far from her native attire. In the one she wears the
street clothes of a demimondaine performer, wearing clothes that are
appropriately feminine and French, and she is given the simple genre title
of The Street Singer. In the other she wears the theatrical costume of
another kind of performer, which is masculine and Spanish - as distant
from who Victorine “really was” as the street clothes are proximate to it.
And yet it is the other picture that has her own name in the title, yet at the
same time announcing that she is appearing in guise and playing a role,
that she is precisely not “herself ’ Mlle. V ... in the Costume of an Espada.
In the one Victorine’s body is covered and indistinguishable under her
bell-shaped dress; in the other it is revealed (as feminine) by her skin-
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

tight (masculine) breeches. In the one she is shown

98. CAROL ARMSTRONG

Figure 26. Edouard, Manet, Victorine Meurent, 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of
Richard C. Paine in memory' of his father, Robert Treat Paine II. Courtesy, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.

against a more or less convincing contemporary background; in the other

she appears pasted onto an overtly flattened, unconvincing ground,
demonstrably lifted from mechanically reproduced images.
And in the one painting her features, which are half-concealed,
appear slim and angular and Parisian, whereas in the other image they
are fully revealed, yet they look quite different — plump, applelike, and
Rubensian. From one to the other, however, one thing is held in
common, like a control on the experiment: while Victorine s features
undergo changes, her outward gaze is somehow enough the same to be
recognizable, and with it she frankly acknowledges what the title of the
Espada acknowledges, namely, that when she is in a painting she is a
model, that for that purpose she dons a costume, takes up accouterments,
and strikes a pose; that the changeability of her model’s identity is her
identity; and that, at that moment, her native habitat is the studio and its
images more
Figure 27. I <iou.irti Manet llu Stmt Sint;n. 1 s<>.> Mihcuin of Hue Arts.. Boston Bequest ot S.ir.ih
( ho.ite Sens u> mentors ot her liti'l'.ind. |oslm.i Montgomery Sears Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston.
98. CAROL ARMSTRONG

Figure 28. Edouard Manet, The

Fifer, 1866. Musée d’Orsay,
Paris. (Photo R.M.N.)

than the street or

the stadium. Or, to
put it differently,
her gaze spells out
the fact that within
the world of
painting both the
quotidian street and
the theatrical
stadium are simply
aspects of the
studio — the studio
in costume.
In 1866 Manet
again painted
Victorine twice in
guise (Figs. 28 and
29).This time he
painted her first as
a little boy in
trousers and then
as an adult woman
at home in a pink peignoir. 77ie Fifer is thought to have had several
models, among them another family member, Manet’s illegitimate son
or half-brother or half-nephew Léon Leenhoff, as well as Victorine: it is
easily conceivable that Manet used Victorine as a placeholder for Léon
when he was not
 TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE

Figure 29. Edouard Manet, YOHUÇ Lady in 1866, 1866. Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Erwin Davis, 1998. (89.21.3)
100. CAROL ARMSTRONG

Figure zo. Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries, c. 1862. National Gallery7 of
Art, L ondon. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the National Gallery.

there and perhaps also vice versa, Léon as a placeholder for Vic- torine -
and both as placeholders for the other young boy who, it is said, had
been sent to Manet as a model for this picture. 9 In any event, however
the modeling sessions actually happened,Victorme’s bald-foreheaded
stare is certainly discernible in The Fifer, whose winged eyebrows, small
nose, and half-hidden mouth directly recall the similarly limned features
of The Street Singer, in combination now with the projecting ears and
childish width of Léon s face and his shorter boyish body. (Of all her
parts, Victorine’s body is the least recognizable here; it is her gaze that
announces her presence. But then, throughout the pictures in which she
makes an appearance, her body was always disappearing and changing
shape — far more even than her face.)
In The Fifer Manet seems to have been rather fascinated with the
notion of using the doubled figure of the female model and the family
member - to stand in for himself perhaps? He had done something
similar before, in the Déjeuner. Manet very rarely portrayed his own
features per se: he seemed remarkably uninterested in depicting
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

himself as himself. When he did portray himself it was always as part of an

allusion to the history of painting - in the Music in the Tuileries (Fig, 30), for
example, painted the year before the Déjeuner (each functions, I think, as a
kind of antedote to the other: the first, which depicts society as a world of, by,
and for artists, nonetheless pretends away the studio, whereas the second
announces the studios presence in the picnic), he appears at the left margin,
barely squeezed in, much as Raphael appeared at the courtly, spectators edges
of the School of Athens (Vatican Museum, Rome); in his later 1879 self-
portrait with brush and palette, he adopts, reverses, and closes in on the stance
of Velazquez in Las Meninas (Museo del Prado, Madrid), updating it with
modern clothes.
More often, Manet would use others to stand in for himself; by the end of
the sixties, it would be writers and critics like Duret, Astruc, Zola, and then
Antonin Proust (whose portrait Manet based on his own persona as presented
in an earlier portrait by Fantin- Latour); in the earlier sixties, partly out of
convenience to be sure, his choice of stand-in was most often his brothers, his
wife’s son — and Victorine. Kin on the one hand, familially close to him but
not him, adjacent to him but not identical to him; his studio “other” on the
other hand, his opposite number, the prime object of liis painterly gaze: his
brothers, Léon, and Victorine seemed to frame him as figures at one and the
same time of identity and alterity — as figures of identity as alterity. With
The Fifer, the defining of identity via adjacence, opposition, and alterity
would be jumped up one notch, by the fact that the figures of the familial and
the feminine other are collapsed into one (and by the fact that the familial
relationship between Manet and Léon was indeterminate to begin with).
The place of this framing of identity was, of course, the studio, and
Victorine was Manet’s prime studio persona. As tor The Fifer’s “companion,”
the Young Lady in 1866 (Fig. 29), she is again Victorine more or less as
herself, presented somewhat as if she were chez elle, and as if we, the
spectators who might have sent her the posy she sniffs, might presume to be
on intimate terms with her, to know her for who she really is, when she’s at
home and has, figuratively speaking, let down her hair - except that her home
is still the studio, and her hair, her clothes, all that she is belong to that
domicile; it is studio property. Dressed en déshabille in a bell-shaped piece of
feminine apparel similar in its shape to The Street Singers street
102. CAROL ARMSTRONG

dress, the Young Lady in 1866 provides a similar contrast to the trousered
figure in The Fifer as that found in the dynamics of the masculine and
feminine, the body-revealing and body-conceahng costuming of the Espada
and The Street Singer. But where both pictures of the 1862 Victorine pair had
contextualizing backgrounds brushed in, now both pictures of the 1866
Victorine pair have blank, grayed, Velazquez-inspired backgrounds, more
overtly than ever stating that the proper context of these images is the
theatrical space of the studio, with its poses, costumes, and accouterments, its
theatrical conferring and changing of identities, its circulation and
reproduction of depictions from the past, and its out-and-out performance of
the exhibition value of the image.
In both pictures little illusionistic games are played, jokes about the
paintedness of the paintings’ illusionism: in The Fifer there is that
famously ridiculous shadow cast by the “boy’s” foot; in the Young Lady
in 1866 there is the parrot stand, with its overtly painted effects of glass,
metal, and wood, with the peeled orange at its base referring to the Dutch
and Spanish still-life tradition, with its handles turning illusionistically in
space to mediate between the putatively projectile three-dimensionality
and the literal two-dimensional flatness of the painting. In both pictures
something is held up to the model’s face, partly obscuring her features in
the one, on the verge of doing so in the other, as if still questioning her
recognizability and the role that the “beholder’s share” of illusionism
plays in it.10 Thus, in these pictures as in those of i862,Victorine’s face
and gaze are used to announce that painting is an illusionistic
performance that takes place between painter, model, and history of art
and that the studio, not the “real world,” is the stage for that
performance, the stage on which the play of identity - both the painter’s
and the model’s - is enacted reciprocally, and for an audience.11

1863: ANOTHER READING OF OLYMPIA

Manet would paint Victorine Meurent one last time, in 1872, when she
served as the model for the mother or governess in the Gare Saint-
Lazare (Fig. 31). There, however, though her stare is still recognizable in
spite of the less assertive domestic look about her, she disappears into
her role much more than she had in Manet’s earlier painted uses of her.
But let us return to 1863. That year,Victorine’s
 TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE

Figure ZI. Edouard Manet, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1873. National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W
Havemeyer.

features appeared in the pair constituted by the Déjeuner and Olympia (Fig.
15), the most dramatically quotational of all the pairs, and marked by the fact
that Victorme appears naked in both - without clothes, but in the costuming of
art-historical nudity.
Surrounded by a plethora of accouterments, grouped together with other
figures, with backgrounds that mediate between art-historical past and
sociosexual present, Victorine’s face and body undergo the same subtle
changes from rounded to angular, large to small as found in the other pairs,
and her Titian hair and the quality of her stare nevertheless continue to
suggest that this is the ‘ same” woman — the same model. In this pair of
pictures that sameness is both asserted and questioned, this time by matching
a certain indeterminacy in the rendering of Victorine to a mixing-up of differ
104. CAROL ARMSTRONG

ent facturai manners. In the Déjeuner; on the one hand, we find those
different manners assigned to two separate renderings of the female body,
which look like nothing more than two views o' the same woman (though my
guess is that Victorine did not actually pose for both; the sketchy Watteau-
derived figure seems clearly lifted from art rather than life). In Olympia, on
the other hand, those two manners are, as Tim Clark has beautifully shown,
collapsed into the single rendering of her face, distinguishable only when one
moves back and forth in front of the painting, from the hard, slicked-back
flatness of Olympia-Victorine’s face from a medium distance to the softer,
more yielding painterliness of her mouth, chin, and loosened hair up close: 12
she is a bit like the two women of the Déjeuner collapsed into one - one,
however, who is also two
The indeterminacy in the look of Olympia has been attached by Clark
to the discourse on prostitution that ran rampant through the critical and
caricatural reception of her when she was shown in 1865. But I wonder if
that indeterminacy, reattached to the studio and its moment of production,
might not be understood instead as an aspect of Manets thematics of the
model. For if we reconsider Olympia together with her alter ego(s) in the
Déjeuner, and place her back in the context of the studio rather than that
of the street or the boudoir, she begins to appear, again, as an image of
Victorine rather than the woman the paintings title names her — as yet
another Mlle. V ... in the Costume of ... . Seen together, the Déjeuner
inflects Olympia with its more overt statement to this effect: that the
woman it depicts is a character drawn from the history of art, that her real
context can be only the studio, and that her audience can be only
spectators at the studios exhibition of itself. For if in his 1862 and 1866
Victorine pairs Manet consistently contrasted Victorine as more or less
herself, the professional painters model13 — alternating between
performing herself and performing someone-else from the history of
painting, and showing, in effect, how she performs herself whenever she
performs the painterly persona of someone-else (and vice versa, too) - he
did so in 1863 as well, moving between two pictures in which Victorine
more or less refuses to be absorbed into her pictorial role. In the
Déjeuner the refusal is just a little more insistent; in Olympia it is just a
little, but only a little, less insistent.
Clark has also argued that the subversiveness of the Olympia
 TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

resides largely in the naked rendering of her body and that

the paintings refusal to fit that body to its accouterments and its art-
historical references in large part accounts for the critics’ reading of
Olympia as a low-rung prostitute (rather than the courtesan that her
adornment and surroundings suggest) and for their missing the
reference, to the Venus of Urbino.'14 Again, however, if we consider
the Olympia and the Déjeuner as a pair and the world they refer to
as that of the studio, the question of the rendering of the model’s
body, and of its discrepancy with its surroundings, might be slanted
a little differently For now the body, as well as the face of Vic-
torine, takes part in Manet’s play of identity-as-alterity, and in
running the gamut between small and pert and challengingly
passive, on the one hand, and large and heavy and inert, at once
flattened and rounded, on the other, the two pictures, taken together,
seem to tread the line between the body’s essential anonymity and
its particular possession of personality - or at least its taking part in
a person’s personality (in this case, multiple personalities)
Furthermore, that the locus of pictorial interest and painterly pleasure is
not the female body is everywhere but the female body is observable in both
paintings. In each a stark, unmodulated body — sensuous it is not — is framed
by and contrasted to a deliciously and variously painted world and to a rich
assortment of colored accessories. A studio reading of that twice-painted body
as another of Manet’s studio properties, another of his painted flats, might
serve to cover this observation better than an account according to class —
better than discovering a proletarian corporeality m Victorine’s painted body
A reading of Victorine’s bluntly discrepant figure as a piece of painted
discourse — Manet’s discourse — on the “nature,” or better, the culture, of
femininity7 might shift the slant as well.
Taking the Olympia together with the Dejeuner, we might need to consider
just how inadequate the critics’ readings were to the former, and just how
poorly their pot-boiler realism and their offhanded references to the discourse
on prostitution served them in confronting Manet’s work. It was not that there
was no contemporary discourse that was a match for the Olympia — there was,
and it was Baudelaire’s writing on femininity: it was just that the majority of
the critics writing about the Salon of 1865 were not up to Baudelaire’s
weight.15 Baudelaire’s writing is not identical to Manet’s painting either, of
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

course; the two men were friends and

107 CAROL ARMSTRONG

contemporaries, but they were different people with different formations

working in different media. What Baudelaire’s writing does suggest, however,
is something of what it was possible to articulate, in this case about femininity,
back in Paris in the 1860s:

[I]n a word, for the artist woman is not only . . . the female of
man. . . , She is not an animal, I say, whose limbs furnish . . a perfect
example of harmony; she is not even the type of pure beauty, such as
the sculptor dreamt of. .. . Here we are not dealing with Winckelmann
and Raphael. . . . Everything that adorns woman ... is part of herself . .
. What poet would dare, in the painting of pleasure caused by the
apparition of a beauty, to separate woman from her costume516

By now it hardly needs saying that Baudelaire was writing about

Constantin Guys, not Manet. However, the terms Baudelaire used to
describe the art value of the feminine are remarkably consonant with
Manet s painting of the sixties, particularly the scandalous pair of
Victorine pictures of 1863, roughly contemporaneous as they were with
Baudelaire s The Painter of Modem Life. For though in one sense Manet
has indeed “separated] woman from her costume,” m another sense he
has followed Baudelaire s dictum in both paintings, demonstrating that
femininity is costuming and that even the naked body of his model,
within the “painting of pleasure,” is a costume. And like Baudelaire,
Manet has defined the feminine in terms of the changeable and the
supplemental rather than the essential: contrasting his modern
understanding of the feminine as changing fashion to the godly beauty
contests, courtly homages, and normative corporeality of antiquity and
the Renaissance by quoting from the museum twice over, updating his
quotes with modern apparel and adornment, and locating painterly
pleasure in everything that frames the female body, rather than in that
body “itself” - in its patent artifice rather than its “nature,” its
fashionability rather than its animal bodiliness, its lability rather than its
stable essence.
In this instance Baudelaire used the figures of Raphael and
Winckelmann to stand for everything his feminine was not. Elsewhere in
The Painter of Modern Life he used the figures of Raphael and Titian-

There are in the world . . . artists, people who go to the Louvre

Museum, who pass rapidly in front of a crowd of very interest
TO PAINT, TO POINT. TO POSE
10
8
ing pictures, although of second order, and who plant
themselves to meditate in front of a Titian or a Raphael,
one of those which have been popularized the most in
prints; then they leave satisfied, more than one saying to
himself “I know my museum.”17
In another passage, Baudelaire named Raphael and Titian once more:
If a painter ..having to paint a courtesan of the present day is inspired (that
is the consecrated word) by a courtesan of Titian or Raphael, it is infinitely
probable that he will paint a false, ambiguous and obscure work. The study
of a masterpiece of that time and that genre will teach him neither the
attitude nor the gaze nor the grimace nor the vital aspect of one of those
creatures which the dictionary of fashion has successively classed under
the coarse or familiar titles of the impure, the fille entretenue, the lorette
and the biche.18
Writing in the interests of “modern-life” and the physiognomies specific to
it, Baudelaire castigated painters who “knew their museum,” who relied on
masterpieces in the Louvre for “inspiration"’ (with typical sneering
intelligence Baudelaire italicized his skepticism regarding the common way of
speaking about the act of quoting from the history of art). He skewered those
same painters for neglecting the panorama of contemporary femininity and for
thinking that their art-historical goddesses could substitute for modern demi
mondaines. (The range of epithets Baudelaire employed, again with a certain
distancing, doubleedged curl of the lips at contemporary habits of locution, to
indicate women of ill repute — impures, filles entretenues, lorettes, and
biches — would seem to align with the then-current discourse on prostitution.
I think, however, that both he and Guys, the artist he was writing about, were
less socially specific on this score than either the codifiers of nineteenth-
century prostitutional sociology or later realist novelists and image makers.
The women they valued as objects of representation were society’s marginals,
certainly, but they were also marginals whose social place was defined,
paradoxically, by a certain mobility not available to respectable women. They
were demimondaines, the female counterparts, not of the male animal, as
Baudelaire might have said, but of that most artificial of masculinities, the
dandy.19)
It might have seemed, when The Painter of Modern Life came out
io8 CAROL ARMSTRONG

in November and December 1863,20 that Baudelaire was castigating his friend
Manet too, swimming in on an opposing tide from that of the Salon critics two
years later, questioning Manets taste for aping the past masters of art rather than
lampooning and exaggerating the iffy contemporaneity of his female model. Yet
at the same time the oppositions between contemporaneity and art history found
in Baudelaire’s essay on Guys adequate the tensions built into Manets 1863
Victorme pictures. Titian and Raphael versus the modern impure, the museum
versus the chic fille entretenue, the old-master gravure versus the up-to-the-
minute lorette and the state-of-the-art biche: these were exactly the oppositions
mobilized by Manet in his two pictures of Victorine dating from 1863. Except
that Manet collapsed the oppositions, pictorially demonstrating that the old
masterpieces of Titian and Raphael were enacted by an impure whose modern job
it was to do such acting and that the museum and the gravure, rather than the
street and the forest, thereby became the proper habitat of his fille entretenue, his
lorette and biche. And it was in that artificial habitat that the slippery
Baudelairean femininity so attractive to Manet as well could best be performed'
so went Manet’s special, painting-specific claim. It was in that artificial habitat,
with all its costume changes, that Manet could identify with that brand of
femininity and its alterity; it was there that he could “be outside of himself, and
yet feel himself' everywhere at home,” there that he could “enjoy his incognito
everywhere,” there that his “mor insatiable du non-moi,” his “cult of himself ”
could find itself “in the other, in woman.” 21 It was there that he could stare, not so
much at some prostituted female body but back at his feminine other, himself. It
was there that he could return her gaze and make it his own. (One hack
caricaturist got this right, at least: Bertall named Olympia “Manette” in his
cartoon for Le Journal Amusant of May 27, 1865, no doubt meaning to signal her
unfemininity but suggesting as well that she was a figure for the artist himself. 22)

BACK TO THE DEJEUNER

The Déjeuner disputes its own alibis in contemporary culture and plein-
air nature more obviously than Olympia does; that is part of the
comparative logic of the 1863 pair of Victorine pictures. Indeed, the
Déjeuner is more about the world of the studio and the play of iden
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

tity that happens in it than any of the other pictures of

Victorine. It is much more about the world of the studio, its
objects and its processes, its actors and its spectators, than
anything else in the exterior world of its contemporary
culture. In fact, with its reversal of the order of the usual
relation between studio and represented world, such that
representing a scene in the world becomes a way to represent
the studio rather than the other way around, the Déjeuner,
even more than Manet’s other Victorine pictures, may be
seen as a staging of that world as against the fictional “real
world” it conjures up.
As in the other pictures of Victorine, the Dejeuner’s turning against itself
— its refutation of its own fiction in order to assert the manner of that fiction’s
production as well as its labile quality — seems to reside most of all in the
obstinate opacity of Victorine’s gaze. But to that gaze the Déjeuner also adds
(not necessarily in this order) the seemingly deliberate illogic of its naked
women and clothed men, the implausibility of the quickly brushed-in
background, the unabashedly supplemental quality of the still life, the
narrative emptiness of the one man’s pointing gesture, and the plethora of art-
historical images to which that gesture seems to refer, while also directing us
to Victorine. The Déjeuner; in other words, supplements its meditation on the
studio and the model with other interconnected thematics found here and there
in other paintings and gathered together here in concert.

I know my museum'
Replication is at issue, for one thing. Added into the Dejeuner’s equation is
the fact of mechanical reproduction: most prominently found in the central
gesture of Eugène-Gustave s arm, lifted, as we know, from Raimondi’s
engraving after Raphael’s Judgment of Paris (Fig. 11), and underlined in
Manet’s habit of making his own series of reproductions after his paintings. In
this case his reproductions include another, smaller painting and a watercolor
after a photograph of the “original” oil. So that replicated index finger points
us to the fact that Manet “knows his museum ’ - knows both the museum of
the Louvre, in which he found the original Pastoral Concert (Fig. 8), and the
“museum without walls,” in which he found the rest of the references that
make up the Déjeuner.
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

With that pointing finger Manet also gestures toward the mixing
110. CAROL ARMSTRONG

up of the spaces of the studio, the museum, and the early mass media — the
spaces of facture, exhibition, and dissemination - and shows how they are
thoroughly interconnected. For in tandem with the indexing of the fact of
replication, that pointing finger also directs us to the model’s frank
acknowledgment of the modeling session that is under way. In so doing it
indicates not only the collapse of the modern impure and the art-historical
gravure but also the spectators destiny of the scene of painting and the scopic
value of the multiplied image - the way that, in the era of the museum, the auratic
gesture of the painter is confirmed (rather than undermined) by its multiplication
and dissemination and the way a painting like this one is made to be exhibited, to
become a spectacle, the way it is produced (privately) to be optically consumed
(in public). In short, the exhibitionism of Manet’s Déjeuner, as indexed in his
brother’s gesturing arm and condensed in his model’s bold gaze, directly connects
the intimate self-referentiality of his studio to the multiplied exhibition value of
modern painting.23

His other, woman:

In addition to muddying the waters at the boundary between auratic
handmaking and mechanical reproduction, the Dejeuner’s foregrounding
of the world of the gravure ties one kind of replication to another: the
replication, and reversal and variation, of the image to the replication,
reversal, and variation of the model’s identity. For Eugène-Gustave s
replicated index finger points us, among other things, to the way Victor
me Meurent and Ferdinand Leen- hoff are as much replicas and
alternates as they are each other’s opposites. It also points us to some
other dungs concerning men and women, the same and the other, soi-
même and autrui.
Where later Manet would collapse his favorite female model together
with a family member, in the Dejeuner he laid them out next to one
another, folding them out, side to front to side, doubled three-quarter
glance to profil perdu, feminine to masculine to feminine back to
masculine again, so that female model and family member together form
a closed, self-referential circle, reinforced by Eugène-Gustave s gesturing
hand, broken only by Victorine’s outward gaze and the loose facture of
the bent-over figure in the middle distance. The masculine and the
feminine have been twice
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

opposed - naked versus clothed, white versus black - but they are also
twice twinned, to form a double Janus figure. And although the particular
identity of each of the players in the picture is already in question, as a
result of the musical chairs played by models substituting tor each other
and because of the many roles played by the principal model, the very
‘nature” of identity is put into question as well: by the intrusion of
alterity into the family circle and of femininity into masculine society
(not to mention the demimondaine into the bourgeois confines of
patriarchal domesticity24). Thus, in the world of multiplied images in
which they three or four exist, identity fonctions much like the gravure:
by a series of varied replications and reversals, positive to negative, dark
to light, left to right. And masculine to feminine as well: in that world
gender is a matter of reversal and replication too, or so the Déjeuner
proposes. Which brings us back to the model’s stare once more, a stare
that mirrors the “male gaze of the spectator more than it answers to it,

Everything that adorns woman:

As she appears m the Déjeuner Victorine is not much of an object to solicit
the gaze; instead, it is as if she is the gaze itself, in female form. It is hard to
determine whether her look is challenging or accepting, whether she stares
the spectator down, looks through or past him/us, or openly returns his/our
gaze. (It is hard to tell that about her in all the pictures that Manet painted of
her.) Instead, she offers a female image of what it looks like to look. Or
better, she looks, rather impossibly, like two figures in one: a figure for the
gaze itself and a figure for the gaze’s object. As overtly as she is a painters
model, she must stand for the painter’s (and hence the spectator’s) object as
well; but at the same time, again because she so overtly belongs to the studio,
because she stands — or sits — for it, because she figures the scene of
painting, she is a figuration of the painter too, and of what the painter does.
In this way as well she untidies the neat old binarisms of gender and the gaze;
collapsing them, she renders them together; she alters them.25
Together with everything that frames her, Victorine alters the pictorial
place of Woman, shifting it, as I have tried to show, toward the Baudelairean
conception of femininity Surrounded by a world of nature that is patently
not-nature, Victorine’s place is in the
112. CAROL ARMSTRONG

world of art. Compared as she is to a sketchy bit of rococo femininity, the

point is redoubled: she is lifted from, and into, art. And then paired as she is
with an elaborately spontaneous, an artificially “natural” still life, one that
proclaims the means of illusionism, as Manet was wont to do, in such details
as the white highlights upon the bunches of loose cherries, the point is
redoubled again. Like those cherries, like the painted evidence of her
discarded costume, like that old sign of abundance and delectation, the
overflowing basket of fruit, Victorine is the product of the means of art; she
is the sum of that which decorates and frames her, of everything that is next
to her and around her, of all that supplements her. She, like painting itself, is
all decor, all costume, all supplement.26
Victorine is, in short, a figment of art. At the edge of the Déjeuner
and in the middle of it, she is the model who announces her studio
context and her exhibition value. At once at the side and the center of the
Déjeuner, she is a figuration of the studios theater of unfixed identities,
less a female body that is an object of consumption than the changeable
feminine face of painting, defined by artifice rather than nature, as a
multiple image rather than a single truth, as the supplemental rather than
the essential, as at once the painters Self and his Other. Installed at the
forefront of the Déjeuner, she is the painter’s Woman, with whose
plural, feminine identity the painter complexly identifies — by posing
her, pointing at her, and painting her in the painters studio.

NOTES

I- Svetlana Alpers has remarked in Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the
Market (Chicago: 1988), p. 56, on the similarity between Manet’s staging of
Victorine Meurent and Rembrandts theatrical uses of the model. There are
many other overlaps, too, between the practices of the two painters and
between Alpers’s and my treatment of them: in both the studio looms large
However, my approach to the studio is much less anthropological than
Alpers’s: I have not attempted to reconstruct the social structures embodied
in Manet’s studio or the conditions surrounding and informing it; rather, I
have simply attempted to read the studio’s presence in the paintings
themselves.
2. 1 hêodore Duret, Histoire d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris: 1926;
1st ed. 1902), pp. 88-9: “Mais lorsqu’il eut été paint,. . . je vis cependant que
Manet n’en était pas satisfait. 11 cherchait à y ajouter quelque chose. Un jour
que je revins, il me fit remettre dans la pose où il m’avait tenu et
TO PAINT. TO POINT, TO POSE 113

3. plaça près de moi un tabouret, qu’il se mit à peindre, avec

sa couverture d étoffe grenat Puis il eut l’idée de prendre
un volume broché, qu’il jeta sous le tabouret, et peignit sa
couleur vert clair II plaça encore sur le tabouret un
plateau de laque avec une carafe, un verre et un couteau .
Enfin, il ajouta un objet encore, un citron, sur le verre du petit plateau. Je l’avais
regardé faire ces additions successives, assez étonné, lorsque, me demandant
quelle en pouvait être la cause, je compris que j’avais en exercice devant moi sa
manière instinctive et comme organique de voir et de sentir.” Cited in Françoise
Cachin, Manet 1832-188J (Paris: 1983), p. 288.
4. On Ferdinand Leenhoff’s relationship to the Manet family, see the essay by Nancy
Locke in this volume. I agree that the evidence points to Ferdinand’s being the son
of Manet père, but there is enough uncertainty about it and enough mythmaking
about his being the possible son of Edouard himself that my preference is to
continue to register the ambiguity- of his status in the family.
4 See Cachin, as in note 2, pp. 104—5. Also see Adolphe Tabarant, “La fin
douloureuse de celle qui fut l’Olympia,” L Oeuvre, July TO, 1932; Margaret
Seibert, A Biography of Vîctorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of
Edouard Manet, Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1986; and Eunice
Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her
Own Desire (NewYork: 1992).
5 I am indebted to Michael Fried’s seminal “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art,
1859-1865,” Artforum 7 (March 1969), 21-82, for any and all remarks about
Manet’s “sources" (and particularly for the observation about Manet’s Watteau-
borrowing in the Déjeuner), though I depart from Fried’s stress on the overarching
unity and Frenchness of Manet’s art-historical quoting. See also Michael Fried,
Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London:
1996), for his updating of his original argument about Manet’s “sources.”
6. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (New York: 1985), pp. 93-6, on the critics’ unawareness of the
Olympia’s reference to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. See also T. J. Clark,
“Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of‘Olympia’ in 1865,” Screen (Spring
1980), pp. 18—41
7. Most of what 1 have to say about Manet and “exhibition value” rests on Walter
Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (New York:
1969), pp. 217-51. See also Jean Clay, ‘Ointments. Makeup, Pollen,” October 27
(Winter 1983), pp. 3-44, m particular for its discussion of Manet’s engagement in
the culture of the museum; and Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Sherry Simon,
trans. (Ithaca. 1977)> PP- 92-3,
114. CAROL ARMSTRONG

8. cited in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge,

Mass.: 1993), P 50.
8 It should be noted that I mean this not as an intentionalist account of the work
of art and its “internal evidence’’ but rather as a formalist argument,
specifically as a reformulation of Clement Greenberg’s formalist axioms
about modernism in “Towards a Newer Laocoon, Partisan Review (July-
August 1940); also in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and
Criticism. John O’Brian, ed. (Chicago: 1986), vol. 1, pp. 23-38. Further
worked out m my ‘’Factoring Femininity: Manets Before the Mirror
October 74 (Fall 1995); and “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes
on the Bar at the Folies-Bergères” in 12 Views of Manet’s Bar at the
Folies-Bergères, Brad Collins, ed. (Princeton: 1995), pp. 25—46; the notion
of “difference” that is at work here, though it is meant to retain its gender
resonances, ultimately derives from another discourse entirely, namely,
Roger De Piles’s concept of color as the “difference ’ (rather than the
“essence”) of painting: Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris: 1673). See Jacqueline
Lichtenstein, La couleur éloquente: Rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique
(Paris: 1989); and “Making Up Representation:The Risks of Femininity,”
Representations-20 (Fall 1987), 77-87.
9. See Cachin, as in note 2, p 243.The hypothesis that Victorine modeled for
The Fifer was first made by Paul Jamot, ‘ Manet, ‘Le fifre’ et Victonne
Meurend,” La Revue de I’art ancien et moderne 51 (May 1927), 31—41; the
suggestion that Léon Leenhoff also modeled was made by A. Tabarant,
Manet et ses Oeuvres (Paris: 1947), p. 119. Supposedly, a young boy from
the Imperial Guard was also sent to pose for Manet by commandant Lejosne
10. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Elusion: A Study in the Psychology of
Pictorial Representation (Princeton, i960), p. 39, for his coining and
defining of the by-now classic term the “beholder’s share.”
11. The foregoing section is a condensation and variation on my discussion of
the 1862 and 1866 Victorine pictures in “Manet/Manette: Encoloring the
I/Eye" Encoding the Eye, Stanford Humanities Review 2, no. 2—3 (Spring
1992), 1-46.
12 See Clark, as in note 6, p. 137’ “There are two faces, one produced by the
hardness of the face’s edge and the closed look of its mouth and eyes; the
other less clearly demarcated, opening out into hair let down.” This section
on Manet’s Olympia depends on Clarks reading of the painting at all points,
but it shifts the slant away from the reception of Olympia and the question of
class and changes the object of interpretation, from the battle of
representations that constituted French culture in 1865 to the painting per se.
13 Ï have used the term “professional” a number of times. By that I do not mean
to indicate either the business of modeling or the economic trans
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

actions of the studio: that is for others to pursue. Instead, I simply mean to
underline the vocational aspect of the model’s self-referendality and to
distinguish between one kind of social physiognomies and another - between
the physiognomic milieu of the prostitute and that of the model.
14. This is my understanding of Clarks argument: see Clark, as in note 6, p. 146,
on Olympia's nakedness as “a strong sign of class, a dangerous instance of
it.” My rereading of the Olympia is predicated, at least in part, on the
principle of looking at the artists larger “oeuvre” — not for its unified,
developmental logic or for its expression of the psychology of Manet but
rather for its particular series of pictorial fascinations and recurrences.
15. When Olympia was exhibited in the Salon of i86z, Baudelaire was in
Brussels, and there was a brief exchange of letters between Manet and the
poet-regarding the scandalized public reaction to the painting. Otherwise, the
only textual evidence that Manet might have been thinking along
Baudelairean lines comes in the form of the vaguely Baudelairean poem by
Zacharje Astruc, which Manet originally appended to the title of Olympia in
the Salon catalogue: see Clark, as in note 6, pp. 80—3. See James Rubin,
Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (London: 1994), pp. 101 —9,
on the relationship between Manet’s painting and Baudelaire’s poetics (and,
in general, on the performativity characteristic of Manet’s art). It is, of
course, by no means new to associate the practices of Baudelaire and Manet
with one another.
16. “[L]a femme, en un mot, n’est pas seulement pour l’artiste . . la femelle de
l’homme . . Ce n’est pas, dis-je, un animal dont les membres . . . fournissent
un parfait exemple de l’harmonie; ce n'est même pas le type de beauté pure,
tel que peut le rêver le sculpteur . . Nous n’avons que faire ici de
Wmckelmann et de Raphaël. . . .Tout ce qui orne la femme . . , fait partie
d’elle-même. . . . Quel poète oserait, dans la peinture du plaisir causé par
l’apparition d’une beauté, séparer la femme de son costume’” - Charles
Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,’ Curiosités esthétiques, L’Art
romantique et autres Oeuvres critiques de Baudelaire, Henri Lemaitre, ed.
(Paris: 1962), pp. 487-9
17. “Il y a dans le monde ... des artistes, des gens qui vont au musée du Louvre,
passent rapidement devant un foule de tableaux très intéressants, quoique de
second ordre, et se plantent rêveurs devant un Titien ou un Raphaël, un de
ceux que la gravure a le plus popularisés; puis sortent satisfaits, plus d’un se
disant: 'Je connais mon musée.’” - Ibid., p. 453. The italics are Baudelaire’s.
18 “Si un peintre ..., ayant à peindre une courtisane du temps présent, s’inspire
(c’est le mot consacré) d’une courtisane de Titien ou de Raphaël, il est
infiniment probable qu’il fera une oeuvre fausse, ambiguë et obscure L’étude
d’un chef-oeuvre de ce temps et de ce genre ne lui enseignera ni
Ii6 CAROL ARMSTRONG

l’attitude, ni le regard, ni la grimace, ni l’aspect vital d’une de ces créatures

que le dictionnaire de la mode a successivement classées sous les titres
grossiers ou badins d’impures, de filles entretenues, de lorettes et de biches ”
— Ibid., p. 468.
19. See Baudelaire, “Quelques Caricaturistes Français’’ (1857-8), ibid., p. 285:
“Gavarni a crée la Lorette. Elle existait bien un peu avant lui, mail il l’a
complétée. Je crois même que c’est lui qui a inventé le mot. La Lorette, on
l’a déjà dit, n’est pas la fille entretenue, cette chose de 1 Empire, condamnée
à vivre en tête-à-tête funèbre avec le cadavre métallique dont elle vivait,
général ou banquier. La Lorette est une personne libre. Elle va et elle vient.
Elle tient maison ouverte. Elle n’a pas de maître; elle fréquente les artistes et
les journalistes.” The mobility of the demi- mondaine (or in Baudelaire's
slightly earlier terms, the Lorette) is of a different order from the
“ambiguities” of prostitutional physiognomies, as described, for example, by
Hollis Clayson in Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the
Impressionist Era (New Haven: 1991): quite apart from providing a cover for
the ideological practice of misogyny — for firmly othering, defining the
place of, and fixing blame upon the feminine — the demimondaine seems to
have been a figurative alternative to the social and sexual fixity of the femme
honnête, a form for figuring a kind of mobility within the feminine with
which it was possible to identify. Which is not to say that Baudelaire’s
feminine is without its misogyny; it would be absurd to claim that, for the
disparaging nastiness of the tone of his writing about women is one of its
most apparent characteristics. But Baudelaire’s is a misogyny that is
typically double-edged, more superficial than deeply ideological and more
strategic than anything else: a means of being anything but nice, and a ploy,
not so much for objectifying women as for making them figurative -
figurative of everything that departs from “Nature” and its norms and from
“Man.” For the best discussion of the psychic structure of Baudelaire’s
poetry, including his conflicted identification with the feminine, see Leo
Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: 1977).
20 Le peintre de la vie moderne was published in Le Figaro on November 26
and 29 and December 3, 1863. According to Baudelaire’s correspondence,
however, it was written between the end of 1859 and the beginning of i860,
just as Manet was beginning his painting career - editor’s note, Baudelaire, as
in note 16, p. 453.
21. “|E]tre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi”; “jouit partout
de son incognito”; “moi insatiable du non-moi”; “culte de soi-même”; “dans
autrui, dans la femme”—Baudelaire, as in note 16, pp. 463—4,483.
22. For more on this point, and on the relation between Manet’s practice and the
Goncourt brothers’ Manette Salomon, published in 1855, see my
“Manet/Manette,” as in note 11.
TO PAINT, TO POINT, TO POSE j 09

2
3■ One of the things that a work like Manets Déjeuner helps to demonstrate, I think,
is that Benjamin’s opposition between the au ratio work of art and the world of
mechanical reproduction is too sweeping (“The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” as in note 7. In fact, just as the ‘cult value of ’‘original”
works of art in the modern age depend upon then reproduction and dissemination,
so, in the culture of spectacle, are the spaces of auratic exhibition and mass media
thoroughly interpenetrated. This was already clearly the case in Paris in the 1860s.
24. If I were given to biographical speculation, I would wonder, here, about Manet’s
painting of these pictures around the time he married Suzanne Leenhoff (the
marriage occurred in October 1863, after the couple had lived together for some
time - since i860, when Manet, Suzanne, and Léon moved into an apartment in the
Batignolles together). 1 would also be inclined to speculate about his use of
Suzanne’s brother as well as his own next to a fille entretenue, and particularly
about his use of Leon as a model, over and over again Obviously convenience was
an issue — these were the people, most available to Manet and whose modeling
came cheap. But it seems likely that other considerations may have been at work as
well in his choice of models — that Manet may have been, albeit eUiptically,
working out such things as the ordering of his domestic life, its relation to his
vocational life, the intrusion into the French high-bo ur- geois home of those alien
to it. the exact nature of paternity, and so on.
25. According to the Freudian logic followed in a lot of feminist writing, such
identification with the feminine would be possible on the part of a male subject
only in pre-Oedipal terms — only when the feminine is equated with the maternal.
I do not share the conviction that this is the only possible scenario of masculine
identification with the feminine Nor do 1 share the conviction that every scene
from public life in nineteenthcentury Paris had to follow the same logic of gender
difference (whereby the feminine was irrevocably objectified), or that scenes from
public and private life divided along clear gender lines; see, for example, Griselda
Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art.
(London: 1988).
One last remark needs to be made on the question of gender relations: I wish to
forestall readers from thinking that I am attempting to describe the real-life power
relations between Manet and his model or that I am ascribing either acts of coercion
to Manet or. on the contrary, any real freedoms to Victorine Meurent The power
relations of the studio are not my concern here; I am not particularly interested in
whatever structures of coercion and collusion, dominance and submission were
enacted within the studio. Neither am I aiming to do anything for Victorine
Meürent’s reputation as either woman, painter (which she was as well), or
professional performer; I wish neither to reduce not to expand
118. CAROL ARMSTRONG

that reputation. Rather than as a real woman subject to real social and sexual
pressures (which she certainly was), I have been at pains, instead, to describe
Victorine Meurent as a piece of figuration, a figment of Manets painterly
imagination.Whatever freedoms or coercions are to be found lurking in my
argument are meant to be confined, therefore, to the fictional space of painting: it is
the defining of that space which is at stake.
26. See Jacques Lacan, “Dieu et la jouissance de la femme,” Le Séminaire XX
Encore (Paris: 1975), pp. 61-71, for his discussion of the feminine as the
supplementary (“au-delà du phallus” - p. 69) rather than as the masculine s
complementary term.
 5 NANCY IOCKF.
MANET’S LE DEJEUNER
SUR L’HERBE
AS A FAMILY ROMANCE

C )ne of the challenges of approaching Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur

l’herbe is that of writing about any work of art on its own. Painters look to the
work of other painters; paintings become what others — viewers and artists —
make of them. However worthy of attention a single work might be, perhaps the
very factor that makes the work noteworthy is, paradoxically, its connectedness to
a history of visual precedents, critical literature, social praxis, and responses by
artists who attempt to see it anew and to make ir over again in some significant
way.
In this essay I shall attempt to look at Manet’s Déjeuner as a painting that
declares its connectedness to its history. The history with which I am concerned
here takes several forms. In one sense, it is the history of art: it is the problem first
articulated by Michael Fried in 1969, which asks what to make of the “puzzling,
almost riddling, specificity of [Manet’s] references to previous art.”1 Another
significant history consists of that which others made of the Déjeuner: Paul
Cézanne, for instance, made the Déjeuner a reference point for several early
fantastic landscapes with figures. I will also be concerned with the painting as it is
connected to Manet’s early work in general. The painting was exhibited at the
Salon des Refusés of 1863 flanked by two other canvases: Mlle. V ... in the
Costume of an Espada (Fig. 10) and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). These paintings feature his favored
model, Victorine Meurent, and his brother Gustave Manet, both of whom also
appear in the Déjeuner, and both oi whom wear the

11
9
120 NANCY LOCKE

same Spanish costume.2 A viewer in 1863 would have been

struck by the repetition of costumes and faces; indeed, the group
must have appeared as a coterie of sorts, as party to an “in” joke, as
a meaningful cast of characters. Manet’s use of familiar models, a
repertoire of roles and stock costumes are all aspects of what I will
argue is a “family romance” in Manets art — a fantasy about the
family that, on the one hand, has a biographical component and at
the same time enacts its own history of art.
Originally entitled Le Bain and called La Partie carrée in Manet’s
inventory of 1871, the Déjeuner depicts neither a typical bathing scene
nor a typical picnic; it is not a true landscape, genre scene, or history
painting.3 The bathing figure in the background is totally out of scale
with the foreground figures; the gestures of the foreground figures do not
cohere; the two men seemingly pay no attention to the nude woman, who
looks out of the painting in a way that implies some knowing or collusive
relationship with the beholder. The Déjeuner has been examined as a
recasting of Old Master paintings, as an appropriation of pornographic
photographs and popular lithographs, as a statement about the Parisian
demi- monde, as an allegory of studio painting, as a picture of bourgeois
sociability with its attendant ambiguities, and ~ in the words of Meyer
Schapiro — as “a dream image that [Cézanne] could elaborate in terms
of his own desires.”4 In the early part of this essay, I would like to extend
Schapiro s suggestion and to consider the possibility that in the 1860s
Manet’s painting could have been seen as a dream image. By looking at
Cezanne’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1870-1 (Fig. 4), a painting that
directly took Manet’s painting as its model, I would argue that we might
better understand the “sources” of Manet’s Déjeuner. I would also argue
that an historical investigation into nineteenth-century thinking about the
dream image could yield more insight as to why Manet’s painting was
considered dangerous in 1863. In the later part of the essay, I will link the
ideas about the dream image to the question of what to make of Manet’s
reference to Giorgione in the painting and to the repeated familiar (and
familial) figures and motifs with which Manet was concerned at this
point.

CEZANNE, in his Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, engages in what we might call

an imaginative reworking of Manet’s canvas.5 In Cezanne’s
 LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 121

painting, the female figure at the right, though clothed,

places her elbow on her knee and rests her chin in her hand
m such a way as to recall Victorine Meurent in Manet’s
picture; she becomes Cezanne’s Victori ne here. The balding
male figure with his back to us clearly resembles Cézanne
himself; his fumbling two-fingered pointing gesture mirrors
that of Manet’s male figure at the right and of the ' Victorine
figure in his own painting. His right hand echoes the
somewhat mysterious hand that extends past Victorine on the
left side of Manets grouping. The male figure on the opposite
side of the picnic blanket props himself up as if on a table;
we see lais knee off to the right and wonder how he can be
reclining on the grass and under the blanket at once.
Likewise, the “Cézanne” figure seems to have just emerged
from under the blanket, although the women seem squarely
above it. The blond man appears to be engaged in a staring
contest with the intent dog. As in Manet’s painting, the
déjeuner is not pictured as a three-course meal, here it is
oddly condensed, as in a dream, to a mere three orange fruits
being placed almost ritualistically in the center of the vast
blanket. A man and woman stride off toward the darkness of
the glade at the left The smoke coming out of the
background figure’s pipe wafts and curls its way up the edge
of the glade and finds its echo in the distant clouds, as the
smoker folds his arms and looks on.
Insofar as the picture stakes its claim to be a reworking of Manet’s, it offers
certain narrative possibilities that the earlier painting left unresolved. In a very
real sense, Cézanne seems to be saying, “I was there” at the scene of Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe: “I was the reclining male figure gesticulating in the center
of the picture: Or, looked at another way, he is saying “I was there — I was the
other man in black jacket and white trousers; I was extending my hand past
Victorine.” Or, “I was there - but not part of the group; I was there looking on.”
Cézanne’s picture appears to propose several “solutions” to its own narrative
stalemate. The foreground figures, for instance, rather than remaining at odds
with each other, could instead pair off like the background couple. One could
122 NANCY LOCKE

look at the whole composition as a reversal of Manet’s, with the woman (here
safely clothed) on the right. If one were to look at the background figure as
suggestive of Cézanne himself, then he would seem to be maintaining a safe
distance from the others.
From the look of things, it would appear that Cézanne wanted
 LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 123

to retain certain figurai and scenic aspects or Manet’s painting.

Cezanne’s version keeps these elements in play only to restage
them; it is an homage even while it remains largely a personal
fantasy in which the artist himself watches and participates. The
language typically used to describe the relation between an art
object and a “source” is inadequate to describe the relation between
Cezanne’s and Manet’s paintings. The earlier painting is not so
much a “precedent” or a “source” as it is an entire scenario that
signifies along several lines for Cézanne at this early point in his
own work. Cézanne identifies with Manet and with the painting on
several levels; he wants to be like Manet as a painter in certain
ways, just as he may want to restage the Déjeuner in his own
fashion.6 This complex set of identifications and desires on
Cezanne’s part might involve factors as disparate as the desirability
of Manets notoriety (that is, Manet’s own relationship to the
academy and to the public); Manet’s art as subject of Zola’s interest
(what kind of interest remains open to question); Manet’s handling
of paint; Manet’s dramatic tableau and its narrative possibilities.
Manet’s Déjeuner becomes a fantasy for Cézanne, and as recent
work on the subject has shown, fantasy often involves an entire
scenario of desire, with the necessary inclusion of particular objects,
possibilities, and constraints.7 It may take an activity as its core
element, as Freud suggested in “A Child Is Being Beaten”: the
activity was the parents’ beating of a child, but the role of the
subject changed from being that of the triumphant sibling to the
position of the one punished to that of a spectator looking on.8 As
Constance Penley argues, one of the key elements in the process of
identification with a fantasy narrative is the idea of multiple subject
positions: the viewer or reader might move from a passive role to an
active one or change gender or sexuality along the way.9 What is
significant for our purposes is that the “source” here, Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe, is not merely a theme for Cézanne but rather a
concatenation of aspects of identity formation — public and private,
social and psychological, artistic and somatic (in the Lacanian sense
of the idealized image du corps) — which are not simply repeated
but grappled with, assumed, refrised, and remade in complex
ways.10
There was no shortage of interest in dreams in midcentury Paris. Even
124 NANCY LOCKE

before the efflorescence of la psychologie nouvelle in the 1880s and

1890s, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a great increase in
 LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 125

the number of psychological studies with scientific

pretensions.11 There were evening lectures at the Faculté de
Médicine on such topics as the nature of hallucinations,
dreams, and what we would now call the unconscious;12 one
could also pick up the newspaper to read the latest feuilleton
popularizati ons of these advances in psychological theory.
Not only was Manet’s close friend Baudelaire heavily
involved with investigations into dreams and opium- induced
hallucinations, but also the critic Edmond Duranty published
articles on dreams in the early 1860s.13 There was, in fact, a
debate about the nature of dreams and other kinds of mental
images in this period. The dream image occupied a liminal
space between, as Cabanis called them, le moral and le
physique. At the center of the debate was the existence of free
will.14 Advocates of positivism or materialism argued that
there was no such thing as free will, that all aspects of human
behavior and mental life could eventually be explained by
physical laws.15 On the other side, the spiritualists and the
enemies of positivism argued that dreams would always
escape the laws of science. They sought to preserve a notion
of the mind as "a radically free entity,” uncontrollable,
unquantifiable, and distinct from the body.16 This notion of
the mind supported the existence of the moral choice, as
nothing physical or innate would then govern ethical
behavior. Both physiologists and spiritualists found support
for their positions in the study of dreams and other kinds of
mental images: such phenomena as retinal images and brain
impulses were beginning to attract scientific interest in this
period, and the possibility of retrieving hard-core physical
data appealed to the physiologists. Conversely, spiritualists
claimed that dreams were involuntary and pointed to them as
evidence that the mind escaped the order the physiologists
sought to impose.
Jules Baillarger, one of the founders of the Société Médico-Psychologique,
initiated a kind of philosophical compromise between the two positions. 17
According to historian Jan Goldstein, he ‘postulated a split between the voluntary
and directed use of the faculties of memory and imagination and their involuntary
or unregulated use.”18 The human will functioned in the context of voluntary and
126 NANCY LOCKE

conscious activities, but during periods of unconsciousness - sleep,

somnambulism, rapture, intoxication, insanity, drug-induced hallucination,
dreaming, or any other examples of aliénation — free will was in effect
suspended. One was simply not reponsible for one’s
 LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 127

actions. Baillarger’s compromise built a bridge between the

Catholic tradition, which absolved the individual of responsibility
for actions committed in these states; an emerging liberal legal
culture, which instituted the insanity plea m 1838; and the growing
scientific interest in the physiological study of human behavior.19
One book that received much critical notice and was probably familiar
to the artists and writers around Manet was Alfred Maury’s Le Sommeil
et les rêves: Etudes psychologiques sur ces phénomènes, which appeared
in Paris in 1861.20 Maury viewed dreams as having an indisputable
physiological reality of their own. This physical aspect, however, was not
a manifestation of the will; nor was it a conscious activity. In what was
perhaps part of an attempt to avoid alienating those readers fearful that
the physiologists were reducing human beings to the level of animals,
Maury theorized about the involuntary but physical reality of dreams:
It is neither attention nor will which conjures these images for our
intellectual notice, these images which in dreams we take to be
realities; they produce themselves, following a certain law due to the
unconscious movement of the brain, and are a matter of discovery;
thus they dominate our attention and will, and in this way appear to us
as objective creations, as products which do not emanate from us and
which we would contemplate in the same way we would exterior
objects These are not only ideas, but images, and this character of
exteriority gives us reason to believe in their reality21
The ideas I take to be important here center on the notion of the dream as
able to produce images even while conscious control is suspended. This
way of bracketing off the human will allowed Maury and others to come
to grips with the moral question of the dream’s content while recognizing
the connectedness of the dream image to the everyday life of the dreamer.
One can postulate, then, a position that would have been appealing to the
Realists, which took from positivism and materialism the interest in the
physical reality of the dream but that could also support a notion of the
dreams involuntary production
lb speak of the interest in dreams in this period is not to delve into the
kind of material appropriate only for an artist such as Redon or
Grandville.22 Courbet’s interest in theories of the
128 NANCY LOCKE

unconscious has already been documented. 23 It was, in

fact, highly appropriate for a Realist painter in the middle of
the century to be interested in such phenomena. After all, if
Courbet would not paint an angel unless he saw one, he
would refuse to paint anything metaphysical or intangible,
and he would have been interested in asserting the physical or
physiological aspect of the dreamer. Consider Courbets
Young Indies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) of 1856-7
(Fig. 12). I would suggest that Courbets voracious appetite
for the physical aspects of the scene - the women’s droopy
eyelids, their splayed legs, their lace mitaines with jewelry
overlaid, their casual postures - would suggest a Realist
interest in automatisme, in a physiological state in which the
women, as well as the viewer, could not have been in control
of their actions. The picture suggests that the languorous
women, the man who has left his hat in the boat, and the
viewer all have access to a state in which conscious control
of the mind had been suspended, in which libertine behavior
would be fiilly absolvable,
Manets Déjeuner sur l’herbe was most noteworthy in its depiction of a nude
woman staring out at the viewer and all but ignored by her clothed male
companions. Like Courbets painting, there is a breach of decorum in and
around a landscape with figures, a body of water, and a boat. There is an
absence of conscience here on the part of the woman, the men, and the viewer;
the viewer in particular has no pretext for being there and is definitively
implicated in the womans knowing look. Critics at the time complained not that
there was a nude in Manets picture but that there was no pretext for a nude
woman to be lounging near two fully clothed men; they suggested that Manet’s
picture was offensive not because it was immoral but because it was amoral and
sanctioned its own moral omissions in its abrupt physicality 7.24 Conscience was
exactly the aspect of the conscious that was threatened in the age of Darwin. If
the physiologists triumphed, human beings would be reduced, in the eyes of the
spiritualists, to animals functioning automatically, on instinct. Art. which was
traditionally viewed as something to elevate the human spirit, was not a place
to assert the animalistic nature of the human being. T le act of viewing Manet’s
Déjeuner both evokes an unthinkable social situation and suggests the figures’
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 129

submission to involuntary desires. J his was one of the most dangerous things
about the picture’s subject.
Manet, of course, was not trying to paint a picture about uncon-
130 NANCY LOCKE

scious wishes or desires. It is well known that Manet posed the

model Victorine Meurent, his future brother-in-law Ferdinand
Leenhoff, and one or both of his own brothers after the figures in
Raphael’s Judgment of Paris, a work he knew through a print by
Marcantonio Raimondi (Fig. u). As has previously been pointed out,
it was not unimaginable for an artist in Manet’s time to think of
posing contemporary models in tableaux after the great works of the
past — it was a parlor game as well as an aspect of contemporary
art practice — but it was novel for Manet to recast the tone of the
piece so radically and to alter the gender of the characters, the
circumstances of the scene, and the presence or absence of
clothing.25 Antonin Proust, Manet’s friend in their teacher Couture’s
studio, recalled that Manet spoke of having copied “the women of
Giorgione, the women with the musicians,” and of wanting “to redo
it in the transparency of the open atmosphere.” 26 Thus the famous
Pastoral Concert (Fig. 8), at the time attributed solely to Giorgione
but now usually considered to have been finished by Titian, is
displayed alongside Manet’s Déjeuner in every introductory survey
of art history as an example of the modern artist’s taking a subject
out of the past and making it contemporary in dress, manners, and
painting style. One of the starkest formal differences has to do with
the aura of golden light on the female figures in the Pastoral
Concert and the lack of chiaroscuro on the nude figure of Victorine
Meurent. The extremely high value contrasts set off the figures in
Manet’s large canvas in a way which would guarantee that the
painting delivered a powerful punch from whatever badly
illuminated, skied position the Salon jury might have chosen for it.27
The notoriety of Manet’s interest in the Louvre Concert
notwithstanding, a link between the Déjeuner and Giorgione’s Tem- pesta
(Fig. 32) has often been sensed, but until now has never been
substantiated.28 Manet and his brother Eugène traveled to Venice in the fall
of 1853.29 Until recently, it has not been known whether Manet could have
seen the Tempesta, rarely discussed before the publication of Burckhardt’s
Cicerone in 1855.30 However, William Hauptman has recently published a
sketch made by Charles Gleyre on his trip to Venice in 1845.31 Other travel
accounts from the period have mentioned the picture. 32 And a guidebook
by the German art historian Ernst Forster places the painting on view at the
Palazzo Manfrin at least as early as 1840.33 The guidebook, hav-
 LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE
13
1

Figure 32. Giorgione, Tempesta, c 1506. Accademia,Venice.

ing gone through several German editions in the 1840s, appeared in French in
1850 and was in its day a remarkably extensive Mi de to paintings and
monuments in Italy.54 There is, then, an excellent chance Manet had the
opportunity to view the Giorgione and might even have had access to a printed
French source to call it to his attention. 35 Given Manets enthusiasm for the Louvre
painting and the comments about it he made to Proust, it is safe to assume that
while in Venice Manet would have deliberately sought an opportunity to view the
Tempesta and that he would have been highly receptive to its suggestions.
132 NANCY LOCKE

Looking at the Tempes ta as Manet might have, we see that certain

characteristics emerge at once, Manet would surely have admired the
sensuousness of the landscape and the painterliness of Giorgiones
handling of the medium.The pose and ample figure of Manets
model,Victorine Meurent, recall the figure in the Giorgione. 36 Both works
depict landscapes with figures just large enough so that the pictures cannot
be easily categorized as either pure landscape or figure paintings.
Giorgione’s painting, often called The Family of Giorgione in the
nineteenth century — a fact to which we will return — positions a man,
possibly a sentinel, at left; on the opposite side of the embankment is a
woman — nude except for a shawl - who is nursing a baby 37 Vasari
mentions no family of Giorgione that corresponds to the figures we see in
the painting. The Giorgione appears to have been dubbed The Family of
Giorgione based on some verses out of Byrons Beppo of 1817 (“ I is but a
portrait of his wife, and son/And self, but such a woman! love in life!’ 1),
although there are conflicting opinions about whether Byron was
describing the Tempesta or a painting now ascribed to a follower of Titian,
the Triple Portrait (Collection of the Duke of Northumberland, Alnwick
Castle, Alnwick).38 We should bear in mind that if Byron’s verses were
spun around the Tempesta, he would have been responding to some
existing legend about it or some set of formal characteristics of the
painting itself . The scene’s intimacy and casualness, as well as its lack of
a clear narrative program or of any obvious iconographie scheme, could
give rise to the notion that the painting is some sort of family scene or
even an allegory of Giorgione’s illegitimacy or illegitimate child. 39 In the
painting, some question of certainty with regard to the child’s parentage is
perhaps intimated in the way the woman and the man appear to be
unconnected and in the atmosphere of furtiveness that surrounds the
mostly nude woman nursing a baby out in the woods in a stormy setting.
Manet, whose lack of narrative clarity in the Déjeuner is exceeded only by
that of Giorgione’s painting, would surely have been drawn to this scene,
which simultaneously encourages interpretation and thwarts traditional
narrative readings.
The Tempesta exemplifies Giorgione’s embrace of an indeterminate
subject within the pastoral mode of painting. 40 The figures in the painting
are pictured with particular attributes; it would appear that a woman with a
child, a man who carries a weighty staff, and a
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 133

stormy landscape with a distant town (among other details)

could all be clues to some myth or story. At the same time, we
must pay heed to the fact that fewer than thirty years after it
was painted, an inventory of the private collection to which it
belonged referred to the painting simply as a landscape with a
soldier, a gypsy and a child - a fact which suggests at the very
least that its subject was originally elusive or perhaps
iconographically obscure or insignificant.41 What encourages
narrative readings of this painting — and Manet's — is the
way the man looks in the direction of the woman but does not
clearly represent someone who is guarding or caring for her,
whereas the woman, already in a vulnerable position, looks
out of the painting directly at the viewer. The visual force of
her gaze and the impression it makes on the beholder are
singularly and powerfully imitated in Manet’s painting.
Another striking characteristic of the Giorgione painting is the treatment of
the’ female figure. Although she wears a cape half draped over her shoulder,
she is basically nude. Despite the ingenuity of scholars who have ascribed roles
to her that range from Astarte and Eve to the Virgin Mary and beyond, a quality
of unidealized earthiness remains a notable aspect of the painting. 42 The woman
is often identified as a gypsy, and this can be supported by the fact that she is
nursing her child out in the landscape and she appears possessionless. 43 One can
imagine the reaction of the nineteenth-century upper-class viewer on seeing the
baby at the woman's breast in the context of the woman’s relative nudity and
her gaze out of the picture. These attributes are also highly unusual in the
Renaissance. The intimacy of the situation in which the viewer finds the
woman must also be reconciled with her relative lack of connection with the
male figure on the other embankment. This enigma might well have been a
powerful draw to Manet, who would later paint many pictures in which figures
fail to connect.
In Manet’s time. Venetian painting was beginning to receive more attention;
aspects of Venetian painting were admired and emulated by artists as disparate
as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Cézanne. 44 As Anne Hanson has suggested,
Venetian art was considered "realistic” in the mid-nineteenth century insofar as
it was not linked with an intellectual interpretation of nature. 45 One looked at
Venetian painting to admire what Forster saw: the luminosity in the colors
[Glanz in der Farbe].”46 Yet in addition to the obvious
134 NANCY LOCKE

properties of sensuous paint handling and rich colorism, there

is another aspect to what Venetian art stood for in mid-century
France that I think has particular relevance here. Stendhal
summarized the differences between Venetian and Florentine art:
The school of Venice appears to have been born quite simply of the
attentive contemplation of the effects of nature and of an almost
mechanical and unreasoned [non raisonnée] imitation of the scenes
with which it enchants our eyes.
By contrast, the two luminaries of the school of Florence, Leonardo
and Michelangelo, would have preferred to search for the causes of
those effects that they were transporting on canvas.47
Whereas Florentine painters emphasized reason and constructed pictures
according to scientific principles, the Venetians, according to Stendhal,
created enchanting tableaux by contemplating nature and imitating it
mechanically and without reason The word mécanique here, I think, is not
meant to invoke the explicitly machine-like but rather the automatic — in
the sense of l’automatisme — something done reflexively, somatically,
without the exercise of intelligence and moral choice. A dictionary
example quotes Zola in Pot-Bouille, 1882: “Duveyrier raised his feet in the
mechanical fashion of the somnambulist.”48 Stendhal, then, is making a
kind of equation between Venetian painting and a method of copying
nature that was at some level unconscious. Stendhal’s book of 1817,
incidentally, was reprinted as a definitive edition in i860 and was a work
Cézanne mentions having read no fewer than three times.49 One can
therefore assume that it had some currency for French painters in the 18
60s
The physical and the unconscious also make their way into Charles
Blancs introduction of the Venetian School in his Histoire des peintres de
toutes les écoles:
One never sees it [Venetian painting] managed by wisdom, by cold
reason; never held back by respect for history or for proprieties which,
in another School - in ours, for example - would not be violated without
scandal. All proceeds from fantasy: history is recounted like a novel;
the most superstitious beliefs take physical shape, and it seems that the
Venetians are more concerned with figuring the imaginary than with
representing the
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 135

real - impossible things being those which come most easily

to their way of thinking.50
In one introductory paragraph, Blanc speaks of “fantasy,” “the imaginary,’ and
“a child-like naivety,” exclaiming “what abundance of imagination! what
freedom of comportment!” and “all the scenes take place in the land of
dreams.”51 Blanc even appears to have been influenced by Manet’s
appropriation,of Giorgione when he writes: “Giorgione transports us to the
fabulous lands of a Venetian Decameron, where one sees nude women
dreaming sur l’herbe or lending an ear to amorous musicians.”52 Venetian
painting was, for Blanc, a novelistic dream world in which the inexplicable
multiplied, in wliich “the strange dominates, the bizarre triumphs; painting is
no longer anything more than a matter of tours de force of improvisation, or
stage-management behind which there is nothing but a void ” 53 In the same
volume, Paul Mantz’s essay on Giorgione praises the Louvre Pastoral Concert
with the phrase “what absence of subject-matter!” 54 Mantz too seems to be
thinking of Manets painting and not the Louvre Pastoral Concert that he is
ostensibly describing. He overstates the way Giorgione’s second clothed man is
“inattentive” to the first and claims: “How these persons have come to be there,
and why they appear so indifferent to that which they seem to be doing, one
does not know and one does not need to know, for Giorgione is not a doctor in
search of nebulous subtleties, but a painter.” 55 Compare these texts with
Rigollots 1852 essay on Giorgione, which states more accurately that in the
Louvre picture, one male figure “appeared to play the lute or rather to chat with
his neighbor.”56 I think it is possible to assert that by the late 1860s Mantz
misreads Giorgione and Blanc revises his view of Giorgione based on an
experience of Manet s painting.
Manet’s interest in Venetian painting in general can be thought of as an
involvement with a sensuous art, an art that possessed “a strange promiscuity of
times and of personages,’ ' an art in winch “the subject is nothing.” 58 If
Giorgione’s painting contained elements of myth and allegory, it in effect
resituated them in a pictorial world that was primarily sensual. 59 It was this
embeddedness in sensuality that made some viewers in the mid-nineteenth
century somewhat uncomfortable. After a long day of sightseeing in Venice
with Edouard and .Eugène Manet acting as guides, Emile Ollivier bemoaned the
earthiness of Venetian painting. * n the one hand, he
136 NANCY LOCKE
was pleased by a certain freshness about the paintings that made them look as if
they had been painted yesterday. On the other hand, Ollivier despaired: “what
an absence of the Ideal! what materialism!” One can imagine Manet seeking
out precisely these qualities.
At this juncture, we can begin to make more precise postulations about
the connections between Manets painting and Giorgione’s. We have seen
the way Venetian painting in the 1860s was linked with an amoral
emphasis on physicality, with the imaginary or unconscious, and with a
dream world in which there was neither logic nor narrative order. This is
not far from the kind of discourse on the dream world itself that we have
seen in commentators such as Maury The world conjured by Giorgione
was one in which involuntary desires took on physical reality a world like
the dream world in which the inadmissible was permissible and no one —
certainly not the artist — could really be held accountable. Just as Mantz
proclaimed that there is no reason why Giorgione’s figures should be
doing what they are doing, critics in 1863 complained about the way
Manet, in the Déjeuner, depicted persons as objects or automatons. “He
treats human beings and objects in the same fashion,” wrote Adrien Paul;
and Ernest Chesneau: “Manets figures make us automatically think of the
marionettes on the Champs-Elysées: a solid head and flaccid garments.” 60
Manets picture suggested that persons were like puppets. This absence of
conscious control was embodied by the nude woman whose breach of
decorum was exacerbated by the indifference of the men. It was precisely
such an utter absence of moral volition that the French critics saw
animating the paintings of Giorgione. To the nineteenth-century viewer,
the bizarre intimacy of the Giorgione scene would have been unthinkable
outside a familial setting - hence the notion that the Tempesta depicted the
family of the painter. Manet’s gesture of unclothing Victorine must be
understood in the context of a period that emblematized its own prudery,
as Philippe Perrot has pointed out, by covering piano feet in little shoes
and by counseling women to wrap themselves in peignoirs after the bath. 61
Compare the image of the naked Victorine with a nineteenth-century
etiquette manual: during the bath itself, “if necessary, close your eyes until
you have finished the procedure ”62
In addition to trying, however briefly, to reconstruct a context for
viewing Venetian painting in the 1860s, we should also, as Fried
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 137

urges, take into account the extraordinary specificity of

Manet’s sources. It seems to me that what Manet ultimately
made of the Tempesta in the Déjeuner was quite different
from what he made of the Pastoral Concert, and, in turn, far
from what he saw in Marcan- tomo’s Judgment of Paris. We
should keep in mind, for instance, that the Tempesta was
known in only a limited capacity, and then considered an
ambiguous scene of a nude mother and child, or as The
Family of Giorgone - perhaps even as a secret or illegitimate
family of a handsome, robust sixteenth-century painter whose
life and early death remained mysterious.63 Manet’s Déjeuner;
I will argue, is not only a positivist picture of a dream world
and not only an homage to Marcantonio and to Giorgione The
relation between Manets picture and Giorgione’s should, in
fact, be seen along the lines of the reflections on Manet’s
picture made in Cézanne’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: an
imaginative reworking that has the makings of a fantasy. As
such, it becomes a picture of The Family of Manet, or what I
will call a family romance in Manet’s art. Freud’s idea of the
family romance centers on the child’s invention of a
mythology of the family, often one that promises a certain
freedom or set of social possibilities unavailable in the real
family.64 Ferenczi, too, considers within the rubric of the
family romance such imaginings as "affairs between
countesses and coachmen or chauffeurs, or between
princesses and gypsies” or the legends of animals as helpfill
underlings.65 The family romance includes the fantasies of the
imagined illegitimacy of a sibling or the celebrity of the
parents (or, alternatively, that instead of being the child of
socially prominent parents, one belongs to a family of nomads
or gypsies).
The idea that Manet’s Déjeuner has elements of a familial scene has always
been part of what was known and said about the picture. The painting depicted
such family members and intimates as his brother(s), future brother-in-law, and
favorite model The landscape was based on sketches of the Manet family
property north of Paris near Gennevilliers, property that had been a family
home or retreat for generations.66 Several commentators have linked the
painting with a reminiscence of a childhood idyll and with the circumstances
138 NANCY LOCKE

surrounding Manet’s father’s death 6

It might be useful here to review certain facts of the Manet family
biography. Manet’s father, Auguste, a judge in one of the civil chambers of the
Tribunal de la première instance in Paris,
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 139

came from a long line of aristocratie gens de robe and men of

the law, including juridical councilors to the king of France
Manets mother, born Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, grew up in
Sweden, the daughter of a Frenchman who had helped the
Napoleonic maréchal Charles Bernadotte win the Swedish
throne.69 She was the goddaughter of the king of Sweden and also
had French aristocratic ancestors.
During the years 1850-1, the eighteen-year-old Edouard Manet, having
already rejected law as a profession, failed his naval exams twice and
announced he wanted to be a painter. At the same time, Auguste had a
falling-out with Eugénies brother Edmond Fournier, who had encouraged
Manets artistic leanings since childhood. Eugénies mother died in 1851, an
event that no doubt preoccupied her and at this point may have further
contributed to the distance between the Fourniers and the Manets. And to
top it off, Auguste was once again passed over for promotion to a higher
court. The Dutch musician Suzanne Leenhoff had only recently appeared
on the scene; she was ostensibly the piano teacher to the Manet sons, now
fifteen to eighteen years old. In January 1852, Suzanne gave birth to a son,
Léon. On his birth certificate, the fictitious name Koëlla appears as his
fathers name, and the child was passed off in society by the Manets as
Suzannes youngest brother.70 Art historians had long assumed that the boy
was Edouards son, but circumstantial evidence supports the allegation
published in 1981 that, in fact, Manet’s father Auguste was the father of
the boy.71 The Manets kept the paternity tightly under wraps. Several years
later, in late 1857, Manet’s father became paralyzed after a stroke, which
compounded the symptoms of tertiary syphilis. He died in September
1862, never having regained his ability to speak,
Manet painted the Déjeuner in late 1862 and/or early 1863. At that
time there were at least two pressing issues for the family which I will
argue have relevance for the subject matter of the painting. After the death
of Manet s father, Manet and his brothers decided to sell a portion of the
Gennevilliers property and divide the proceeds. Insofar as the land must
have been a repository of memories of the father, one would surmise that
the estate would have become both an emotional and a financial issue for
the family in late 1862. At the same time, the Manets would also have
found themselves in a bit of a quandary over what to do about Suzanne
140 NANCY LOCKE

and her son. J ie only way to protect her and the family
name, it must have seemed, wor ld have heen for one of the
Manet sons to marry her, the eldest, Edouard, fulfilled that
responsibility by wedding her in October 1863, a year after
his fathers death. Although most art historians have long
assumed that Edouard Manet and Suzanne Leenhoff had
enjoyed a clandestine liaison for a long time, we should take
note of the fact that the marriage came as a surprise to Manets
close friend Baudelaire.72 Perhaps it was not Manet and
Suzanne’s relationship that had to be hidden. Another curious
fact is that although Léon was well cared for by the Manets,
he was never legitimized, even after Suzanne’s marriage to
Edouard, when legitimation would have been automatic had
Edouard been the father. Such was the case with many of
Manet’s artist friends, including Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro,
and Renoir.73 In fact, in French law of the time, whereas
nothing stood in the way of legitimation of children born out
of wedlock upon the marriage of the parents, children born to
individuals who were already married to others at the time of
conception could never be legitimized under any
circumstances.74 This fact alone supports the allegation that
Edouard Manet was not the father of Léon but, rather, that his
father was an individual who was married to someone else at
the time. It was certainly the career and reputation of the civil
judge that had to be protected, and after his death, his memory
and the family name. It is not only the case that the Manets’
social prominence may have motivated such a decision: it was
a fact that Manet’s father, the civil judge, had been called
upon to rule on just such things as paternity disputes. Léon’s
paternity, then, would have had to remain a family secret. It
is, in my view, no accident that Manet’s large painting of
1862—3 pictures family members and intimates on the family
property, and with an air of coterie about them: theme and
LE DEJEUNER. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 141

biographical fact can hardly be separated here. At the same

time, I think the notion of the “family romance” in Manet’s
early work can best be supported by looking at his figurai and
compositional choices in several early works.
Looking at Manet’s subject matter in the early 1860s, one is struck by his
interest in gypsies, ragpickers, street singers, and beggar boys. It is noteworthy
that he does not paint just any street types but by contrast paints recognizable
individuals over and over again. The. Old Musician (National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.) features a
IZ6 NANCY LOCKE
known gypsy violinist, Jean Lagrène, as well as Manet’s own Absinthe Drinker
(Fig. 9), the boy who posed in Boy with Dog (private collection, Paris), and the
very young girl with a baby, who also appears in an etching after the painting. ' 5
At least one of the rag- picker-philosophers from the 1865 series had appeared
in the crowd in Music in the Tuileries (Fig. 30).76 Victonne Meurent, his model
in many of the key early paintings, is the recognizable Street Singer (Fig. 27). It
remained a family tradition that Eugène Manet posed tor the Philosopher (Art
Institute, Chicago), the one who appears most upright and aloof. As was
mentioned earlier, Manet paired Victorine and his other brother, Gustave, as the
Espada and Majo who flanked the Déjeuner sur l’herbe in the 1863 Salon des
Refusés, making the trio of pictures a family grouping. And Ewa Lajer-
Burcharth has convincingly argued that we could look at Manets Absinthe
Drinker, rejected from the Salon of 1859, as a kind of self-portrait of the artist
at the margins of society. 77 In her view, Manet was deliberately courting a
certain kind of marginality by making the Absinthe Drinker his first Salon
submission and, as it were, a personal artistic manifesto. A case can be made
that not only does Manet picture members of his own family as gypsies or street
types but the so- called gypsy or street types recur in his work like a loose-knit
but discernible family - one utterly at odds with the social sphere of the Manets
— a veritable negation in the Freudian sense.
Manet not only invented a family of street singers and gypsies in his
early work he also pictured the social world of his own family. Consider
Fishing (Fig. 14) and Music in the Tuileries (Fig. 30), two small pictures
that can be seen as pendants. They are the same size and were probably
painted within a year of one another, 1861-2, just around the time of
Manets father’s death.78 They are the only multifigure paintings in which
Manet includes a self-portrait; in each case, he appears at the margins of
the picture. Fishing is a fantasy reworking of a Rubens and Carracci
landscape, with Manet himself and Suzanne Leenhoff as the Rubenesque
couple in the front of the picture. Léon Leenhoff is shown angling in the
middle ground; as in the Déjeuner, the site is the family property near
Gennevilliers.79 In Music in the Tuileries, recognizable members of the
Parisian artistic beau monde - Baudelaire, Eugène Brunet, Jacques
Offenbach, Zacharie Astruc - have congregated for a public concert in the
Tuileries Gardens. Music has long been seen as one of Manet’s first great
LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 137
modern life paintings. 1 would point out — and Manet’s preparatory drawing
(private collection) specifically accentuates this - that a family grouping forms
the core of this dense picture of Parisian sociability: Julie Manet identified the
figure of her father, Manets brother Eugène, as the top-hatted figure seen near
the center of the painting, bowing.80 Just to the left of Manet’s brother Eugène is
the figure of a widow, who probably represents Manet’s mother, Eugénie. 81
Further to the left of Eugénie is the towheaded boy in the recognizable costume
of the Boy with a Sword - Léon Leenhoff; he is leaning toward Eugénie and has
perhaps climbed on a chair to do so. Eugène is probably conversing with Léon’s
mother, Suzanne, veiled but not in high mourning; she points an umbrella in his
direction. Inscribed in this picture of public sociability, then, is a private
familial grouping. Fishing and Music in the Tuileries represent the two halves
of the social world Auguste Manet was leaving behind: on the one hand, the
weekend retreat with its quotidian fishermen and the idyllic landscape
(including the adult son, the mistress, and the illegitimate boy) and on the other,
the fashionable Parisian men and women of letters who regularly came to the
Manet household — the widow m her social circle. 1 would suggest that insofar
as Manet has pictured himself in these paintings — stepping into these roles of
the imaginary escort to Suzanne and of the Parisian artistdandy — the intended
spectator of the paintings is in a very real sense Manet’s departed father,
Auguste.82
Manets realization of his own version of the “painting of modern life” m the
early 1860s repeatedly featured a familiar milieu and a familial cast of
characters. Victorine Meurent, of course, figures prominently in this dramatis
personae; she appears as herself, as a street singer, as a model in male
bullfighters costume, in a dressing gown, conspicuously nude at a picnic, and,
notably, as a courtesan. She becomes in effect a member of the family insofar
as she reappears in so many early works; the viewer at the Salon des Refùsés is
encouraged to recognize her with the brothers and again in Spanish costume.
As we have seen, even paintings of a public social world such as Music in
the Tuileries are in a sense circumscribed by a private familial group. In some
ways, the pictures authenticity as Realist paintings depends for its effect on a
degree of spectator recognition ot these characters: the repetitions make the
viewer aware of Manet’s
138 NANCY LOCKE

presence as painter and observer. As Derrida writes of Freud’s

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s references to living “under
the same roof” as the subjects he observes — his daughter and
grandson - ‘ guarantee the observation only by making of the
observer a participant.”84 I think it is safe to say that Manet’s
familial references not only remind the spectator of his own role
but also make the spectator of the painting a participant. It has
long been central to many accounts of Manet’s art that the
spectator and the experience of the spectator play a prominent role
in the framing of Manet’s great figure paintings. 85 I am arguing,
then, that not only does a “family romance” structure Manet’s
early works but that it also frames the experience of the spectator.
It is the spectator at the Salon des Refusés, after all, who is
confronted not only with the brazenness of the Déjeuner but with
the doubling of its figures in the costume pieces that frame it. On
one side, the swarthy selfassured brother; on the other, the female
model in the same bolero; on one side, the .majo cult of male
beauty; on the other, a travesty - a woman in culottes, not a
bullfighter. The costume pieces come across as posed, and they in
turn open up the Déjeuners posed-ness, its status as a reenactment
The reader may be wondering whether the notion of an unconscious
“family romance” emerging in Manet’s Déjeuner might ultimately
contradict a thesis about a “painting of modern life” or Manet’s attention to
contemporary life and a recognizable social world that was part of a set of
explicitly Realist commitments. I do not think this is a contradiction. Just
as it is acceptable in the field of literary studies to think about a text as
interweaving a set of conscious intentions and commitments with another
set of unconscious misreadings and figurations on which the text’s
construction depends, I think it critical that we not confine ourselves either
to Manet’s explicit agenda or to a reading that brackets Manet’s intentions
as irrelevant, unrecoverable, or as a false consciousness. Manet’s Déjeuner
is at once a picture of a dream world, an homage to Giorgione and Raphael
in which the earlier paintings are restaged, and a family drama that is best
understood with some historical distance, with the benefit of Freud and
Lacan. But Manet’s flirtations with a dreamlike recasting of Old Master
paintings - starring his family members and intimates - need further
139 NANCY LOCKE

explication.
The spectator of Manet’s painting in many ways can apprehend

the paintings drama and its mode of depicting a world only by experiencing
several distinct spectators positions within the painting. Perhaps first and
foremost, the gaze of Victorine invites the spectator to identify with her and to
attempt to reconcile his or her own feelings of shock and embarrassment with the
model’s lack of them, with her presence among the clothed males. It is an
experience of what could be called an inhibition of exhibitionism; it is the
experience of the dream of being naked in a social situation and being frozen in
place.86 It is in this sense that the painting replicates the experience of the
Tempesta, in which the woman’s nudity and enigmatic gaze are inexplicable, in
which there is a dreamlike lack of logic when we are led to expect a narrative. On
another level, the painting reworks the Louvre Pastoral Concert and is a
reflection on the subject of a reminiscence of four figures in nature. The Pastoral
Concert depicts a harmonious eclogue and suggests a relation among the figures,
the town, and the landscape that was perhaps meant to have the character of a
reminiscence of something that never was. Manet’s painting substitutes the
setting of a childhood retreat, now irrevocably altered by circumstance. If this is a
picture of a paradise, as several commentators have claimed,87 it is in my view
one that has already been lost and is recognized as never to be regained. The
viewer’s experience of the stark presence of Victorine Meurent, the way her
creamy white figure stands out harshly against the dark greens of the landscape,
makes it impossible to see the relation between the figures and nature as a
harmonious one. There is yet another experience of the spectator that is key to the
picture’s effect. The entire foreground trio seems to be in on something — I
suggest something like a family secret - with which the spectator is expected to
collude. In this scenario, the figures occupy the position of the river gods in
Raphael’s Judgment of Paris and are watching as something else takes place; in
the original story, a choice is made, and a woman given in marriage. In many
ways, the themes and effects of the painting hover around the acts of desire,
protectiveness, reminiscence, and secrecy that characterize an actual family
romance” of Manet. These themes can also be seen to animate the Renaissance
paintings Manet admired — aspects of which he sought to replicate in his
painting of 1862—3. The Tempesta, in particular, insofar as it appeared to
represent an allegory of he Family of Gior- gone, could have provided Manet with
a complex model for sug
14v NANCY LOCKE
gesting relationships among the figures without resolving them, for emphasizing
the sensuousness and materialism of the landscape, and for in some way picturing
a family and entrusting its secret to the gaze of a nude woman out of the painting.
I see these themes and histories not in terms of a set of unconscious motivations
and biographical facts somehow taking precedence over the more public,
professional ones: I see them as profoundly connected to Manets project as a
painter of modern life.

MANET’S 1871 INVENTORY was a private document, drawn up late in the

year, when Manet was not able to paint in the wake of his grim experience
during the Siege of Paris and the Franco-Prussian War. It is significant that
in the inventory he noted the painting as La Partie carrée (Le Déjeuner sur
l’herbe) and valued it at 25,000 francs, higher even than the Olympia. The
inventory may provide us with a clue into the way Manet himself thought
of and referred to the painting.The title is possibly a reference to Watteaus
La Partie quarrée (Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco), an image Manet
may have known, as Ingres did, from a Boucher print after it. 88 But the
phrase, then as now, refers to a foursome with the implicit connotation of
sexual partner swapping.
Michael Fried has argued forcefully that Manet’s art of the early 1860s
should be seen as participating in a Watteau revival of sorts. 89 Certainly, it
seems plausible to consider the eighteenth-century painter as the key
predecessor for the complex exchange of glances in the Déjeuner; for its
leftover picnic and discarded clothing, and for its dreamlike mixture of
activities (bathing, picnicking, and more). In place ofWatteau’s recurrent
dogs and sculptures of Venus and Cupid, Manet adds a bright green frog in
the lower left corner. It would indeed be fruitful to look at Manet’s
Dejeuner as Thomas Crow has argued we should regard Watteau’s fêtes
galantes, namely, as a “frankly artificial” genre that added “another,
necessary layer of fiction over the life-as-fiction it portrays.” 90 Ultimately, I
would like the reader to look upon my adaptation of Freud’s idea of the
“family romance” not as a biographical reality painted faithfully by Manet
but as a biographical fiction painted as such. If Manet called the painting -
even in passing - La Partie carrée, it seems he meant the Déjeuner to be a
loose adaptation of several visual narratives with the express possibility that
the actors might switch partners as
LE DEJEU NE P. AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 141

ucil as roles* And as long as the gaze of Victorine Meurent draws the
spectator into the tangle of legs, feet, and hands at the painting’s core, she
or he is offered a similar chance.

NOTES

The research for this essay was facilitated by a grant from the Humanities Center at
Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. I wish to thank Christopher Campbell,
Lucy Locke, Alexander Nagel, César Trasobares, and Paul H Tucker for their
assistance and suggestions.
1. 'Manet’s Sources- Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865,” Artforum 7, no. 7 (March 1969),
29; see also Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 27.
2. There is some disagreement among Manet scholars concerning which of Manet’s
two brothers posed for the Déjeuner. Tabarant claimed it was Gustave; Moreau-
Nélaton that it was Eugene; Proust that they posed in turn Proust may be correct; the
figure has Eugene’s finer features and Gustave’s dark hair. The important point is
that the repetition of costumes and features among the three paintings at the Salon
des Refusés was noticeable See Adolphe Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris:
1947), p. 61; Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, Manet raconté par lui-même (Paris- 1926),
vol. 1, p. 49; Antonin Proust, “Edouard Manet inédit,” La Revue Blanche 12, no. 85
(February 15,1897), 172.
3. The 1871 inventory is reproduced in Paul Jamot and Georges Wilden- stein, Manet
(Paris- Beaux-Arts, 1932), vol. 1, p 89.The catalogue entry by Françoise Cachin in
Manet 1832-1883 (New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), p 172, gives a
complete provenance for the painting.
4. Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Psychoanalytic Meaning
of Still-Life” (1968), reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art, Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1986), p. 9. See also Judith
Wechsler, “An Aperitif to Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts
6 per., 90/1308 (January 1978), 32-4; Beatrice Farwell, Manet and the Nude (New
York: Garland, 1973), pp. 149, 250—6; Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the
Modern Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 1977), PP 92—5; Wayne Andersen, ‘ Manet
and the Judgment of Paris,” Art News 72, no. 2 (February 1973), 63-9; T. J. Clark,
The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New
York: Knopf, 1984). pp 4-5; and the essay by Carol Armstrong in this volume In
addition, Hubert Damisch reflects on the relations between Manet’s painting and the
myth of the Judgment of Paris, as well as on the philosophical foundations of a
notion of the judgment of beauty, in The Judgment of Paris, J. Goodman, trans.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
142 NANCY LOCKE

5. A bibliography on the painting can be found in Lawrence Cowing, Cézanne:

The Early Years, Exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery
of .Art and Abrams, 1988), p. 172; see also the catalogue essay by Mary Louise
Krumrine, “Parisian Writers and the Early Work of Cézanne,” pp. 25-7.
6. Richard Wollheim, in Painting as an Art (The A W Mellon Lectures in the Fine
Arts, 1984, Bollingen Series 35, no. 33; Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987), pp. 231-46, considers Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of
influence” and brings it to bear on Manet’s identifications” with earlier masters,
as well as with Picasso’s phantasmagoric reworkings of Manet’s Le Déjeuner
sur l’herbe.
7. See the entry on “fantasy” by Victor Burgin in Feminism and Psychoanalysts,
E. Wright, ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 84-8; Constance Penley,
“Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture,” Visual Culture,
N. Bryson, M. A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds. (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan
University Press and University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 302—24;
and the classic essay by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontahs, Fantasy
and the origins of sexuality,” reprinted in Formations of Fantasy, V Burgin, J.
Donald, and C. Kaplan, eds. (NewYork: Routledge, 1986), pp. z—34.
8. Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’. A Contribution to the Study of the
Origin of Sexual Perversions,” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey, ed./trans (London:
Hogarth Press, 1958), vol. 17, pp. 179-204 (hereafter abbreviated S. E ).
9. See her “Introduction - The Lady Doesn’t Vanish: Feminism and Film Theory,”
Feminism and Film Theory, C. Penley, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp.
22-3.
10 Here I have in mind both Lacans 1949 essay,“The mirror stage as formative of
the function of the I,” Ecrits, A, Sheridan, trans. (New York: Norton, 1977), pp.
1—7, and his remarks in Le Séminaire. IV: Les relations d’objet, 1956-57, J - A
Miller, ed. (Paris- Seuil, 1994), pp. 173-8, in which he discusses his concept of
Timage du corps” and its status as imaginary. One could make an analogy
between Cézanne’s way of viewing and appropriating the image of Manets
Déjeuner and the Lacanian subject’s view of the idealized reflection in the
mirror: the subject recognizes the image with elation but remains irrevocably
estranged from it. One treatment of these early Cézanne paintings that attempts
to bring together personal fantasy and professional ambition is that of Meyer
Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 3rd ed. (New York-Abrams, 1965 [1952]), pp. 24-6. In
his introductory essay, Schapiro analyzes the violence of Cézanne’s early
fantasy pictures, winch Schapiro considers to be modern-life images and which
he opposes to Delacroix’s settings in a remote place or time. The author views
these images as inextricably connected, both in style and iconography, with the
artist’s early emulation of Manet and his friendship with Pissarro.
 LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE
M3

11 See Debora L Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics. Psychology

and Style (Berkeley; University of California, 1989), pp 75-106.
i_ Jan loklstein notes that these lectures ‘were open to interested, medical students and to
physicians and discusses a suspension of these talks as a result of a controversy in
1865 over Alexandre Axenfeld’s lectures on the innocence of witches tried for
sorcery in the sixteenth century. See Console and Classify Tht French psychiatric
profession in the nineteenth century (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
pp. 355-6; see also Aristide Verneutl et al., Conférences historiques faites pendant
l’année 1865 (Paris: Ballière, 1866). Sartre also refers to the 1865 debates of the
Société Médico-Psychologique 111 L’imagination (Paris: PUF, 1989 [1936]), p 21.
13. Edmond Duranty, “Notes sur la vie nocturne,” Nouvelle Revue de Paris 6 (November
1, 1864), 534-58; “Le Sommeil et les rêves,” Musée Universel 2 (1873), 218-20.
14. Here I am indebted to the arguments put forth in Goldstein, as in note 12.
15. Goldstein, as in note 12, p. 245. She explains the history of terms such as
positive philosophy in philosophical and psychological circles of the period and
wishes to distance herself from the overuse of the term 1 materialist (pp. 242—4); I
use the term here for its familiarity to art historians.
16. Goldstein, as in note 12, p. 243.
17. Baillarger’s “Théorie de l’automatisme,” published in 1845, was reprinted in
Recherches sur les maladies mentales (Paris: Masson, 1890), vol. 1, pp. 494-500.
18. Goldstein, as in note 12, p 263, discusses the significance of Baillarger’s argument
for the psychiatric field of the time.
19 The insanity plea was, of course, based on the idea that one was not responsible for
one’s actions at the moment the crime was committed; it was thought that one was
literally aliéné, alienated from the self. A fascinating discussion of these
developments can be found in Goldstein, as in note 12, pp. 276-321.
20. Published by Didier. Edmond Duranty, for instance, praises the book in his 1864
article, as in note 13, p. 558.
21. Maury, as in note 20, p. 38: “Ce n’est ni l’attention ni la volonté qui amènent devant
le regard intellectuel ces images que nous prenons en rêve pour des réalités; elles se
produisent d elles-mêmes, suivant une certaine loi due au mouvement inconscient du
cerveau et qu’il s’agit de découvrir; elles dominent ainsi l’attention et la volonté, et
par ce motif nous apparaissent comme des créations objectives, comme des produits
qui n’émanent point de nous et que nous contemplons de la même façon que des
choses extérieures. Ce sont, non pas seulement des idées, mais des images, et ce
caractère d’extériorité est précisément la cause qui nous fait croire à leur réalité "
144 NANCY LOCKE

22. On this aspect of the work of Redon, Grandville, and Victor Hugo, see Stefanie
Heraeus, Traumvorstellung und Bildidee: Surreale Strategien in der
franzôsischen Graphik des ig.Jahr hunderts (Berlin-Reimer, 1998).
23. See Aaron Sheon, “Courbet, French Realism, and the Discovery of the
Unconscious” Arts 55, no. 6 (February 1981), 114-28; Michael Fried offers a
fascinating discussion of Courbet’s involvement with automatism in Courbet’s
Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); for example, Fried
discusses the notion of “habit” propounded in Félix Ravaisson’s De VHabitude
of 1838 as something located between the will and nature (pp. 182—4); Fried
expresses certain reservations about labeling Courbet an out-an-out materialist
or positivist in light of the literature on l’automatisme; he borrows Ravaisson’s
phrase “spiritualist realism or positivism” for this purpose (p. 184). Fried also
discusses Courbet’s involvement with photography as evidenced in The
Quarry (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) as “a fantasy of the act of painting as
wholly automatisée and therefore very close to the taking (or shooting) of a
photograph” (p. 280).
24. Théophile Thoré, for instance, criticized “ce contraste d’un animal si
antipathique [he means "le monsieur étendu près d’elle”] au caractère d’une
scène champêtre, avec cette baigneuse sans voiles, qui est choquant,”
L'Indépendance belge (June 11, 1863); also cited in Alan Kreil, “Manet’s
‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ in the ‘Salon des Refusés’ A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin
65, no. 2 (June 1983), 318.
25. Hans Tietze, “Manet and a So-Called Velazquez,” Burlington Magazine 69, no.
401 (August 1936), 85; Wechsler, as in note 4, 32—4 The parlor game of
tableaux vivants in which women, usually demimondames, shed their
crinolines in favor of flesh-colored leotards and posed to re-create mythological
scenes is discussed in Octave Uzanne, Fashions in Pans: The Various Phases
of Feminine Taste and Aesthetics from 1797 to 1897 (New York: Scribner’s,
1898), p. 139. The Judgment of Paris, incidentally, was a favorite subject.
26. ‘“11 paraît, me dit-il, qu’il faut que je fasse un nu. Eh bien, je vais leur en faire,
un. Quand nous étions à l’atelier, j’ai copié les femmes de Giorgione, les
femmes avec les musiciens. Il est noir, ce tableau. Les fonds ont repoussé. Je
veux refaire cela et le faire dans la transparence de l’atmosphère, avec des
personnes comme celles que nous voyons là-bas.” Antonin Proust, Edouard
Manet: Souvenirs (Paris: 1913), p 43.
27. Thomas Crow writes of a similar strategy in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the
Horath (Salon of 1785); see Stephen Eisenman et al., Nineteenth-Century Art:
A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 19.
28. One mention of a link is Christian Hormg. Giorgiones Spdtwerk (Munich:
1987), p. 153-
29 A colorful account of the Manet brothers’ Venetian voyage can be found
 LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE US

in Charles Limet, Un vétéran du barreau parisien: quatre-vingts ans de souvenirs,

1827-1907 (Paris: Lemerre, 1908), pp. 200-8. See also Emile ( Sllivicr, Journal,
1846-1869, T. Zeldin, ed. (Paris: Julliard, 1961), vol 1, p. 168.
30. Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some aspects of taste, fashion and collecting
in England and France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp 15-16.
31 William Hauptman, “Some new nineteenth-century references to Giorgione s 1
empesta, Burlington Magazine 36, no. 1091 (February 1994), 78-82.
32. See ibid, and a follow - up letter by Jaynie Anderson, Burlington Magazine 36, no.
1094 (May 1994), 316.
33. Ernst Forster, Handbuch fur Reisende in Italien (Munich: 1840), p. 770. See my
letter, ‘ More on Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’ in the Nineteenth Century” Burlington
Magazine 38, no. 1120 (July 1996), 464.
34. Manuel du voyageur en Italie, 4th ed., rev. (Munich- 1850), p. 571: “Scène [restée
inexplicable) entre un vieillard, une femme et un enfant, en plein air” (brackets
original)
35. Manet and liis brother did act as knowledgable guides to the artistic monuments of
Venice for the benefit of Emile Olivier; see Zeldin, as in note 29, vol. i,p 168.
36. Farwell, as in note 4, p. 224, remarks on the ample figure of Victorine Meurent in the
Déjeuner as uncharacteristic of Manet’s representations of her in other paintings. As
for whether the figure in the Déjeuner registered as ample with the viewers of the
time, consider the fact that Alexandre de Pontmartin, in his review of Zola’s
L’Oeuvre, reads Claude Lantier’s painting called Plein air in the novel as Le
Déjeuner sur l’herbe and complains about the overuse of the words ventre (he stops
counting at 45 instances) and cuisses (48). See Souvenirs d’un vieux critique (Paris:
Calmann Lévy, 1886), vol. 7, p. 385.
37. Jacob Burckhardt’s reference reads: “Das Bild im Pal. Manfrin, als ‘Familie G s’,
bezeichnet, ist ein eigentliches und zwar friihes Genrebild in reicher Landschaft.”
Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genu/3 der Kunstwerke Italiens (Basel:
Schweighauser’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1855), p. 963.
38. This was a matter of dispute in the nineteenth century as well as today Marcel
Jérôme Rigollot, Essai sur le Giorgion (Amiens: Duval et Herment, 1852), for
instance, discusses the Triple portrait as the picture Byron celebrated, but refers to
Byron’s letters and professed ignorance of painting, not to the Beppo (p. 27).
39. This appears to have been one of rhe anecdotes in circulation in the nineteenth
century, and it is repeated by Antonio Morassi, Giorgione (Milan: 1942), p. 87. See
Salvatore Settis, La “Tempesta” interprétâta* Giorgione, i committenti, il soggetto
(Torino: Einaudi Editore, 1978), p. 59, or the English edition: Giorgione’s Tempest:
Interpreting the Hidden Subject, E. Bian- chini, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), p. 59. Settis also
146 NANCY LOCKE
discusses an 1894 reading by Angelo Conti, who held that the lightning represented “the
tragedy of paternity” (pp. 50, 56).
40. I have in mind here some recent work by Alexander Nagel, such as “Lotto’s
Washington Allegory,” a paper presented at the 1994 College Art Association
Conference. I am indebted to Alex for sharing his views on Venetian art with
me. See also Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of
Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Reak- tion Books,
1993), pp. 50-3.
41 This is a very delicate point, as there have been many interpretations suggested
for the Tempesta that have some merit. One could argue, for instance, that the
painting depicts the legend of Saint Theodore, an interpretation suggested by
Nancy De Grummond (see her “Giorgione’s Tempest: The Legend of St.
Theodore,” L’Arte 18-20 [1972], 5-53), and that the iconography was
significant to certain viewers of the time but not so striking that it made its way
into the 1530 inventory. “El Paesetto in tela con la tempesta, con la cingana et
soldato fù de man de Zorzi da Castelfranco” — so reads Murcantonio
Michiel’s inventory of the Vendramin collection in 1530. Reprinted in Notizia
d’opere di disegno . . . scritta da un Anonimo Morelliano, lacopo Morelli, pub.
(Bassano: 1800), p. 80. See also The Anonimo: Notes on Pictures and Works of
Art in Italy Made by an Anonymous Writer in the Sixteenth Century, P. Mussi,
trans., George C. Williamson, ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903), p,
123.Williamson's introduction explains the circumstances of the discovery of
the “anonymous” manuscript by the Abate Don Jacopo Morelli in 1800 and its
attribution to Marcantonio Michiel.
42. A comparative table of interpretations appears in Settis, as in note 39, pp. 78-9.
43. Paul Holberton, in “Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’ or ‘little landscape with the storm
with the gypsy’: more on the gypsy, and a reassessment,” Art History 18, no. 3
(September 1995), 383-403, presents convincing evidence that the woman in
the painting would have been read as a gypsy in the sixteenth century
44. See Erik Forssman, Venedig in der Kunst und im Kunsturteil des ig. Jahrhun-
derts (Stockholm: Studies in History of Art 22, 1971); Dianne Sachko
Macleod, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Titian,” Apollo 121 (January 1985), 36-
9; Michel Florisoone, “Manet inspiré par Venise,” L’Amour de I’Art 17
(January 1937), 26-7. A period-by-period survey of critical attitudes can be
found in Charles Dédéyan, “Giorgione dans les lettres françaises,” Giorgione e
l’umanesimo veneziano, R. Pallucchini, ed., 2 vols (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,
1981), vol. 2, pp. 659—746. Cézanne speaks frequently about his emulation of
Titian and Veronese in Conversations avec Cézanne, P-M. Doran, ed (Paris:
Macula, 1978).
45. Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modem Tradition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977), p. 75; see also pp. 8-9,145.
LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 147

4^< Briefe über Malerei in Bezug auf die kôniglichen Gemàldesammlungen zu Berlin,
Dresden und München (Stuttgart and Tübingen: 1838), p. 59. Subsequent editions of
Fôrster’s Italian travel guide actually contained brief phrases meant to guide the
visitor toward an appreciation of the particular strengths and salient characteristics of
each artist
47. Stendhal [Marie Henn Beyle], Histoire de la peinture en Italie, rev. ed. (Paris;
Michel Lévy Frères, i860 [1817]), p. 125: “L’école de Venise paraît être née tout
simplement de la contemplation attentive des effets de la nature et de l imitation
presque mécanique et non raisonnée des tableaux dont elle enchante nos yeux. ... Au
contraire, les deux lumières de l’école de Florence, Léonard de Vinci et Michel-
Ange, aimèrent à chercher les causes des effets qu’ils transportaient sur la toile.”
48 Trésor de la langue française, Paul Imbs, ed. (Pans: Gallimard, 1985), vol. 11, p 542:
‘‘Duveyrier levait les pieds dans un mouvement mécanique de somnambule.”
49. Cézanne refers to having read the volume, first in 1869, then for a third time in 1878,
in a letter to Zola of November 20, 1878. See Paul Cézanne, Correspondance, John
Rewald, ed. (Pans: Grasset, 1978), p, 176.
50 See Charles Blanc, Ecole Vénitienne, Ecole Espagnole (Paris: Vve. Jule Renouard,
1868), p. 4 “On ne la voit jamais dirigée par la sage et froide raison, jamais retenue
par le respect de l’histoire ou de ces convenances qui, dans une autre Ecole, dans la
nôtre, par exemple, ne seraient pas violées sans scandale. Tout y procède de la
fantaisie: l’histoire y est racontée comme un roman: les croyances les plus
superstitieuses y prennent un corps, et il semble que les Vénitiens soient plus propres
à se figurer l’imaginaire qu à se représenter le reel, les choses impossibles étant
celles qui leur viennent le plus facilement à la pensée.”
51. Ibid.: “fantaisie,” “l’imaginaire,” “une naïveté enfantine,” “quelle abondance
d’imagination! quelle liberté d’allure!” and “toutes les scènes se passent dans le pays
des rêves.”
52. Ibid., p. 5: “Giorgione nous transporte dans les contrées fabuleuses d’un Décaméron
vénitien, où l’on voit des femmes nues rêver sur l’herbe ou prêter l’oreille à des
musiciens amoureux”
53. Ibid., p. 6: “L’étrange domine, le bizarre triomphe; la peinture n’est plus qu’une
matière aux tours de force de l’improvisation, ou un machinisme derrière lequel il
n’y a que du vide.”
54. “Le Giorgione,” in ibid., p. 4: “quelle absence de sujet!” As Theodore Reff has
pointed out, the essays that make up the Histoire des peintres were published serially
as fascicles well before they were collected into the large volumes. See “Manet and
Blanc’s ’Histoire des peintres’,’ Burlington Magazine 112, no. 808 (July 1970), 456-
8
55. Mantz,“Lfc Giorgione,” in Blanc, as in note 50, p. 5:“Comment ces personnages sont
là. pourquoi ils paraissent si indifférents à ce qu’ils semblent
148 NANCY LOCKE
56. faire, on ne le sait pas et l’on n’a pas besoin de le savoir, car
Giorgione n’est point un docteur en quête de subtilités
nuageuses, il est peintre [...]
57. Rigollot, as in note 38, p. 17.
57 Blanc, as in note 50, 5: “une étrange promiscuité de temps et de personnages”
was said apropos of Veronese
58. Paul Mantz, Les chefs d’ oeuvre de la peinture italienne (Paris: Firmin -Didot,
1870), p. 205: “le sujet n’est rien” was said apropos of the Pastoral Concert.
59. Admittedly, in the nineteenth century, these were often seen as mutually
exclusive. As Léon Lagrange wrote of a picture in the Uffizi, which he
compared with the Louvre Pastoral Concert, he asked, “Is it an allegory, or
must we see it as one of the caprices of the painter, the analogue of the one
who inspired the inexplicable picture in the Louvre, the Pastoral Concert?
Giorgione had invented the fantasy before the fantasists of our time.”(“Est-ce
là une allégorie, ou ne faut-il y voir qu’un de ces caprices du peintre, analogues
à celui qui a inspiré l’inexplicable tableau du Louvre, le Concert champêtre?
Giorgione avait inventé la fantaisie avant les fantaisistes de notre temps.”) See
his “Catalogue des dessins de maîtres exposés dans la Galerie des Uffizi, à
Florence,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts iz (September 1,1862), 283—4
60 Paul, Le Siècle, July 19, 1863: “Il traite de la même façon les êtres et les
choses”; Chesneau, Le Constitutionnel, May 19, 1863: “Les figures de M.
Manet font involontairement songer aux marionettes des Champs- Elysées: une
tête solide et un vêtement flasque. Both cited in Kreil, as in note 24, p. 317.
61. Philippe Perrot, Les dessus et les dessous de la bourgeoisie: Une histoire du
vêtement au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 22; Le Travail des
apparences, ou les Transformations du corps féminin, X Ville—XIXe siècle
(Paris: Seuil, 1984), p. 117. Perrot (1981) has appeared in English as
Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, R. Bienvenu, trans. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994).
62. Perrot, as in note 61, p. 117, quotes Mme. Celnart, Manuel des dames ou l’art
de l’élégance (Paris: 1833): “s'il le faut, fermez les yeux jusqu’à ce que vous
ayez terminé l’opération”; the custom is also discussed in Guy Thuillier,
L’Imaginaire quotidien au XIXe siècle (Paris' Flammarion, 1985), p. 6.
63 A typical period reference to Giorgione’s life is that of Alfred Dumesnil in
L’art italien (Paris: Girard, 1854), p. 287: “Pauvre et de basse extraction, il a
d’instinct les manières les plus élégantes et les plus distingués. [. . .] C’est un
beau et bon géant; la largeur de sa poitrine est colossale, mais son regard a une
douceur qui enchante.” This comes straight out of Vasari, as do notions such as
those of Rigollot (1852), that he sang and played the lute so beautifully that he
was called in to preside over concerts of all the patrician families, and that “il [.
. .] vécut [ . en galant homme” (p. 6). There was, then, a nineteenth-century
family romance of Giorgione: an idea that he rose from low roots but moved in
elegant circles.
 LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE J 49
64 jigmurw Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works James
Strachey trans. (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), vol. 9, p. 237; The Complete Letters of
Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, J. M. Masson, ed./trans. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Harvard. 1985), p 317.
65 Sandor Ferenczif “Social considerations in some analyses,” International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis 4 (1923), p 477.
66 Tabarant, as in note 2, p 60. The Family held about 150 acres of prime residential
property. Manets grandfather Clément and great-grandfather Clément Jean-Baptiste
had both been mayors of Gennevilliers; Clément Jean-Baptiste started the practice,
carried on by Auguste, of living in Paris and using the Gennevilliers property as a
retreat See Robert Quinot, Gennevilliers: Evocation historique (Ville de
Gennevilliers: 1966), vol. 1. pp. 165-8, 297. Quinot also reproduces a photograph (p
306) of the Manet family farmhouse, rue de Saint-Denis and rue des Petits-Pères.
67 See, for instance, Tabarant, as in note 2, p 60: Farwell, as in note 4, p. 50; Cachin, as
in note 3, p. 167; Eric Darragon, ‘ Recherches sur la conception du sujet dans l’oeuvre
d’Edouard Manet (1832-1883),” Université de Paris-Sorbonne/Paris 4, 1987, mentions
childhood vacations apropos of the “idyllic tone” of La Pêche (vol. I, p. 119, n. 63).
68 A synopsis of Auguste’s career, as well as references to archival documents, can be
found in my “New Documentary Information on Manet’s ‘Portrait of the Artist’s
Parents’,” Burlington Magazine 38, no. 1057 (April 1991), 249-52.
69. Information about Eugénie’s birth, siblings, and parents can be found in Emile
Taillefer, “Contribution d’un Grenoblois à l’histoire de la Suède,” Bulletin du Musée
Bernadotte 17 (December 1972), 13-21.
70 His birth certificate is in the Tabarant Archives, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
71 Mma Curtiss published a claim that “a highly distinguished and reliable writer” who
had married into the Manet family confided the paternity to a close friend. See
“Letters of Edouard Manet to his wife during the Siege of Paris: 1870—'~i,” Apollo
113, no. 232 (June 1981), 378—89.
72. Theodore Reff, for instance, points out Baudelaire’s surprise while supporting the
notion that Manet had been hiding his relationship with Suzanne See “The Symbolism
of Manet’s Frontispiece Etchings,” Burlington Magazine 104, no 710 (May 1962),
186.
73 Anne Higonnet points this out in Berthe Morisot (New York Viking, 1990), pp. 45-6.
74. According to the Napoleonic Code, Article 331, children who were the offspring of
adulterous or incestuous unions could not be legitimized, even upon the subsequent
marriage of the parents. If one of the parents was lawfully married to someone besides
the child's other parent, at least three hundred days prior to the birth of the illegitimate
child, the child
150 NANCY LOCKE
was classified as an enfant adultérin, whose existence was seen in the eyes of the law
as “a violation of the moral laws on which societies rest and “a ceaseless protest
against the sanctity of marriage”; as such, he was denied many of the rights of the
legitimate. See Dalloz, Répertoire de législation, de doctrine et de jurisprudence
(Paris: 1855), vol. 35, pp. 289—309, “Paternité et filiation” Tit. 2, Chap. 1.391.
75. See Theodore Reff, Manet and Modem Pans (Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery, 1982), pp 174-91. I disagree with Reff that Manet’s occasional studio
assistant, the “poor deranged boy” Alexandre, who appears in Boy with
Cherries and is the subject of Baudelaire’s “La Corde,” appears in the picture.
The dark-haired boy on the right resembles the model for Boy with Dog.
76. Timothy Clark pointed out in a lecture course given at Harvard University that
the Philosophe à la main tendue (Art Institute of Chicago) appeared in La
Musique. For more on the series, see Anne Coffin Hanson, “Manet’s Subject
Matter and a Source of Popular Imagery,” Museum Studies, Art Institute of
Chicago 3 (1969), 63-80
77. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Modernity and the Condition of Disguise: Manet’s
‘Absinthe Drinker’,” Art Journal (Spring 1985), 18—26. Lajer-Bur- charth
recast her central argument in light of Lacanian notions of selfformation and
feminist theory — principally that of Joan Rivière and Mary Ann Doane — on
the concept of masquerade in a talk, “Masculinity and Masquerade: Manet’s
‘Absinthe Drinker’ Revisited,” given April 1, 1992 at Harvard University.
78. One cannot, I think, overstate the case for the father’s death as an imminent
reality in Manet’s imagination when the length and extent of the father’s
illness and paralysis are taken into account.
79. Tabarant, as in note 2, p. 34
80. Ibid., 38; Julie Manet, Journal (1893-1899): Sa jeunesse parmi les peintres
impressionnistes et les hommes de lettres (Paris: Klmcksieck, 1979), p. 153.
81. This new identification was proposed by Juliet Bateau in a talk at the
Courtauld Institute, Spring 1991. She added the provision, however, that the
figure might also represent Suzanne Leenhoff’s mother. The biography of
Manet by Brombert points out that the relative who had come to Paris to help
the unmarried Suzanne care for Léon was undoubtedly Suzanne’s widowed
grandmother, not her mother. See Beth Archer Brombert, Edouard Manet:
Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), PP-136-7.
82. Tabarant, as in note 2, p. 34, working from the assumption that Manet was
hiding his relationship to Suzanne prior to the marriage speculates that the
Gennevilliers landscape hardly seemed an ideal place for the couple to
promenade, since they could easily have run into people they
 LE DEJEUNER AS A FAMILY ROMANCE 165

knew One might ask instead just who or what was really being hidden in these
pictured retreats to the country.
83. My argument here, that Victor me becomes in effect a member of the family, contrasts
with that of Carol Armstrong, who sees Victorine as “a figure of the outsider and the
other” next to Manets relatives in the Déjeuner, See 1 Manet/Manette: Encoloring the
I/Eye,” Stanford Humanities Review 2, nos. 2-3 (Spring 1992), 39.
84. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, A. Bass, trans. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), p 299.
85. Michael Fried. Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum, 1965), pp. 4—
lojWollheini, as in note 6, pp. 141-50.
86. Schapiro. as in note 4, p, it, reproduces an 1867 frontispiece to a book on dreams by
Hervey de Saint-Denis, which illustrates the anxiety dream of nakedness; on the
phenomenon of inhibition of exhibitionism, see Gérard Bonnet, Voir — être vu, 2 vols.
(Paris: PUE 1981).
’87. Notably Werner Hofmann, Das Irdische Paradies. Kunst im neunzehnten Jahrhundert
(Munich: Prestel-Verlag, i960), p 348: Farwell, as in note 4, pp. 240-54, discusses the
picture as a ‘ paradise regained."
88. Pierre Rosenberg, in Watteau 1684-1721 (Washington, D.C • National Gallery of Art,
1984), notes that Manet apparently borrowed Watteaus title in his inventory (p. 279).
Rosenberg reproduces the Boucher print and the Ingres drawing.
89. Fried, as in note 1, pp. 40-3; see also Fried, as in note 1, pp. 56-8.This is an
understatement of the case Fried makes for Manets dependence on Watteau.
90. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New
Haven:Yale University Press, 1985), p. 57
 (j MARCIA POTNTON

THE FASCINATION WITH

THIS RENDEZVOUS DOES
NOT DIMINISH . . 7

Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the others’ game (jouer,

déjouer le jeu de l’autre), that is, the space instituted by others,
characterize the subtle, stubborn resistant activity of groups which, since
they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already
established forces and representations.2

In the early autumn of 1994, workers waiting at bus stops,

children on their way to school, flaneurs for pleasure and flaneurs from
necessity, businesspersons hurrying to meetings, and lovers setting out on
assignations in cities the length and breadth of Britain found themselves
gazing at billboards situated at busy crossings and overlooking abandoned
urban wastelands from which leered down the head of a popular
comedian, Alexei Sayle, superimposed upon the body of Victorine
Meurent (Fig. 33). To be more precise, this leering, bearded head, wearing
a knitted beret, burst through a blown-up reproduced detail of Manet’s Le
Déjeuner sur l’herbe at precisely the point where Victorine’s head,
familiar from Manet’s painting, would normally be found. The lettering
— typeface courtesy of Toulouse-Lautrec posters3 — announced “Alexei
Sayle in Paris A new Sitcom. Fridays 3.30 PM. 4.”4
How should we regard this phenomenon? Is it simply yet another
example of the penchant of advertisers with their scant artschool
education to arrest public attention by parodying an internationally
celebrated high-art image? Is it a clever, if tasteless, strategy for
encapsulating (and then marketing) Frenchness - a kind

15
2
 THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS 153

Figure zz. Advertisement for Alexei Sayle’s comedy series on British Channel 4
TV, billboard, autumn 1994. (Photo: Peter Burton)

of populist version of the assumption found among some academics working on

post-Renaissance culture that Paris is the location of all that is significant, a
phenomenon that a colleague once labeled “Paris envy”? 5 Is it yet one more
demonstration of a now well-established pattern in which this particular painting
has been targeted in a widespread practice of appropriation in popular graphics?
Typical of this pattern are the record sleeve of Go Wild in the Country, released
by Bow Wow Wow circa 1981—2 and representing a tableau vivant of the
Déjeuner formed by the members of this rock group (Fig. 34); Posy Simmonds’s
1980 Guardian cartoon featuring the imaginary Jocasta Wright as an art student
outmaneu- vering her politically correct and priggish male tutors (Fig. 35); Sally
Swain’s reversal image Mrs Manet Entertains in the Garden (1988) (Fig. 36); and
a variety of picture postcards including one in which the naked woman has spent
six years getting her M B. A but still finds herself having to use her body to make
a business deal and one in which the woman invites the second man to undress m
an attempt to get rid of an after-dinner bore who drones on about motor cars 6
154 MARCIA PO INTON

Figure 34. BowWowWow, Go Wild in the Country, record sleeve, 1981—2.

All this might tell us something about a poverty of imagination among

a generation of graphic designers, or something about the taste for parody
in Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century. It might be
regarded as an interesting example of the ways in which the margins
subvert the center and how popular culture annexes and transforms
dominant discourses, thereby undermining them. In short, it might be
regarded as offering a fine case of cultural hybridity. Should art historians,
however, pay any attention to such manifestations? Do they have an
impact upon Manets painting as it hangs in distinguished and distinctive
surroundings in the Museé d’Orsay in Paris, and does it provide any
meaningful and productive entree into a discussion of a painting that has
been as intractable for art historians as it has apparently been malleable for
cartoonists and graphic designers? Indeed, so
 THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS 155

Figure 35. Posy Simmonds, Guardian cartoon, 1980. By kind permission of Posy
Simmonds.

intractable is the Déjeuner that it has tended to be passed by in favor of

Olympia (Fig. 15): that was the place where adversarial art historians made their
mark. The pace was set by Georges Bataille in I955, who could scarcely contain
has impatience to move from the Déjeuner to the Olympia of two years later,
stating:
The nude of Le Déjeuner would be a woman - a real woman, like those
bathing in the Seine. But the stridency ot the finished picture, with its
inevitable effects of incongruity, left him dissatisfied; he felt that there was
something arbitrary about the systematic elaboration of the Déjeuner. T
hough he said nothing, he now deepened his enquiry into the effects to be
drawn from the transposition of one world into another. He abandoned the
men in frock coats, clearing the stage of everything except the nude herself
and a maidservant, as he had seen them in the Urbino Venus. ... In the
intimacy and silence of her room, Olympia stands out starkly, violently, the
shock of her body’s acid vivid-
156 MARCIA PO INTON

Figure z6. Mrs. Manet Entertains in the Garden, from Sally Swain, Great Housewives of
Art (London. 1988).

ness softened by nothing, intensified, on the contrary, by the white sheets. 8

Nearly thirty years later, in naming the Déjeuner one of those paintings
that exemplify the city as a “free field of signs and exhibits,” typifying
the combination of display and equivocation that he takes to be the chief
new characterization of modern life, T. J. Clark takes us into a semiotic
era. But the focus of his attention is, like that of Bataille, effectively
Olympia rather than the Déjeuner, which
THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS . . . 157
he considers exclusively (and briefly) as a contrast with the Olympia
before which the critics failed, it is argued, to notice the quotations and
revisions they had laughed at in the Déjeuner.9
In historiographic terms, what Olympia has offered the art historian is the
opportunity to access the topic of prostitution and thereby Open up discourses
of class to which those of gender were subordinate - the project of progressive
marxian art history of the 1970s. Race, which should also have been part of this
discussion (given the presence of the black servant), tended to be occluded. The
status of this servant and the plein-air setting apart, the chief difference between
the Déjeuner and Olympia is that the former contains - in equal numbers - male
and female subjects, whereas the latter contains only two women. It is these
apparent binaries of male/female and clothed/unclothed upon which the
parodists have conducted their experiments. Any attempt to extrapolate from
the imagery of the Déjeuner as part of an agenda for the social history of art is
fraught with difficulty; it is contemporary and yet incredible (it literally cannot
be believed - it is, as Bataille expressed it, incongruous); it contains portraits
(the painter’s brother Gustave, the Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhof, and the
model Victorme Meurent) But its formal affiliations link it to the tradition of
historical painting; the figures recline with patrician authority in a distinctly
nonurban environment that is neither aristocratic park nor productive
agricultural terrain, it refuses any obvious distribution o; power of the sort that
comes so easily in a discussion of Olympia. Above all, it produces a dialectic in
which gender is deeply unsettled and in which the binaries identified above
disintegrate, leaving a semantic void
For the parodists, two facets of the painting are above all a focus of
attention. First, the possibility of inverting gender identities (as with Sally
Swain, who does it peacefully and in a genteel manner, and Alexei Sayle, who
violently tears the canvas to achieve his end) and second, the relation between
nakedness and speech (as with «fosy Simmonds and the two postcard parodies).
I shall suggest that parody does indeed instruct us about the “matrix” image.
Although parody works with subversive mimicry and is often deflationary, its
chief characteristic is analytic; it seeks out weaknesses or inconsistencies in its
original and displays them self-consciously to a knowing audience. Thus, the
audience assumed by Alexei Sayle s poster is in the
158 MARCIA PO INTON

know.” This is a sure sign not only of the canonical status of

the Déjeuner but also of the widespread (if unacknowledged)
recognition of its “incongruity.” Parody does not travesty; it
establishes a creative and ironic relationship with its original.
Unlike caricature, parody is essentially about art, not about life; it
foregrounds stylistics and through subversion does not destroy but
reinforces dominant modes.
I shall take these parodies as critically instructive and use them as a
way of discussing the paintings narrative structure. That the narrative
structure of this particular French painting is especially powerful is
evinced, I suggest, by the evident desire of anglophone viewers to insert
themselves as enunciative subjects in the image’s silent spaces. Just as
popular culture diverts resources and reuses them, so it may also serve as
guide to the divisible components of the image field once it is separated
from aura and from its history. Let us, then, ask what we have here once
the image is detached from its high-art tradition and (in the imagination at
least) removed from the walls of its Parisian art gallery? The components
of this narrative are food and drink, convivial company and leisure
pursuits (boating and bathing), sex, and speech — all elements calculated
to contribute to a good story Add a frog and a goldfinch and an apparently
sunny day and we appear to have the ingredients of a typically mellow
Impressionist narrative of bourgeois pleasure In fact, as virtually everyone
agrees, the components of this narrative do not add up as they should; they
do not produce that kind of story; they are (to cite Bataille again) strident.
The most immediate impediment to an accommodation of the
Déjeuner into the poetics and politics of the contemporary and quotidian
as analyzed by scholars of Impressionism is the disjunc- ture between
contemporary masculine dress and a female nude. But this alone would
not be sufficient to attract claims of incongruity at the time of its
exhibition and ever since. That disjuncture is, after all, a time-honored
one, and the very referencing of Giorgione should have permitted
recognition, however disapproving. Nor does the nude, I suggest, put
Manet “in Courbets camp as a realist out to shock the conservatives.” 10
Visual realist polemic of that kind would have been all too obvious and
therefore all too easy to categorize and thus to dismiss. What is
disconcerting - and consequently destabilizing - about the Déjeuner is the
fact that it does not merely borrow from the great Renaissance masters - it
THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS . . . 173
parodies them. It is to all intents and purposes a history painting, albeit
one with an ironic relation with tradition. Arguably, it is the propensity to
pastiche in the technical sense11 (a propensity well explored by writers as
diverse as Mauner and Sandblad12) that produces, in turn, such a fertile
field for the parodists
The question of history was a challenging one to the generation of the i86os.
Baudelaire in 1859 saw the age as inimical to history painting and extolled the
religious painting of Delacroix as works of an artist “as great as the old masters,
in a country and century in which the old masters would not have been able to
survive.”13 Odilon Redon also identified the period as unsympathetic to the
nonnaturalist and remembered the first halt of the decade of the 1860s as a time
when “we were in the midst of Avant-Garde naturalism” and it was peculiarly
difficult for an artist attracted by ‘ the uncertain at the boundary of thought,” a
quality he found epitomized in the protoallegorical figure of Dürer’s
Melancholia.14 Most symptomatic of the contestation over history painting were
the government reforms of 1863, which wrested control of the Ecole des Beaux-
Arts from the Academy and which provoked an intense debate about the
definition of artistic originality and the educational system most likely to foster
high art.15
The rhetoric of the real dominated the avant-garde of the 1850s and 1860s.
Courbet declared in his letter to a group of students in 1861: “I also believe that
painting is an essentially CONCRETE art and can only consist of the
representation of REAL AND EXISTING objects. It is a completely physical
language that has as words all visible objects, and an ABSTRACT object,
invisible and non-existent, is not part of painting’s domain 16 By situating, to use
Paul Jamot s words, the real in the unreal 17 (contemporary dress in combination
with a classically inspired female nude), Manet’s painting transgresses the
imperatives of the avant-garde to which, at this time, the historical is inimical.
By deploying the mechanism of history painting, the genre and the practice that
a modernist historiographic trajectory tends to define as oppressive, Manet’s
image ruptures the polemics of the avant-garde. But since history in the sense of
istona, the grandest and most venerated of genres, has to coexist with such signs
of modernism as cravats and petit pain as well as freely han- led paint in the
Déjeuner, the idea of history is deployed also, as we shall see, to critique the
very traditions upon which history painting
i6o MARCIA POINTON
depends. In Courbet, for instance, it is popular art forms and
the lower genres that penetrate and threaten the plentitude of la
grande peinture. But with Manet it is la grande peinture that
becomes the instrument through which a critique is produced both
of the limitations of contemporary subject matter and of the easy
and bombastic narrative mode of academic history painting.
The parodies with which I opened serve to explain how the
incongruities of Manets painting work to critique the idea of the real, and
with what effects history painting is deployed in parodic mode. The act of
anarchic occupation of high art by popular culture that we notice in the
advertisement for Alexei Sayles sitcom consists in grafting a particular
and unequivocally male head onto the body of the female nude. As is the
way with creative parody, this does not startle by its impropriety or
threaten the masculinity of Alexei Sayle but rather serves to draw
attention to the sturdiness of Victorine Meurent s body as represented in
the Déjeuner.18 It reminds us that her gaze is utterly unlike that of the
female figure in the central fragment of Monet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe
of 1865—6 (Museé d’Orsay, Paris), that Manets female nude has a thick
neck and stocky shoulders, and that above all she has muscular thighs at
evident variance with both the “pneumatic” academic paradigm of
Cabanel, the buxom fleshliness of Courbet, or the exposed female body as
depicted by Degas or Renoir. Nor is the body of this female model
depicted with the seductive tension apparent in Olympia. In short, this
female body does not fit into the typology of the female nude for reasons
other than those that have been frequently rehearsed with regard to
Olympia. An explanation is, of course, simply that the masculine
characteristics of this figure got carried over from the well-known source
of Manet’s pastiche in the engraving by Raimondi after Raphael’s
Judgment of Paris (Fig. n).To accept this at face value would be, however,
to suggest that Manet was an unsophisticated plagiarist rather than a
highly inventive pasticheur. The question remains as to why, in presenting
a female nude so prominently, should Manet leave space for doubt about
sexual characteristics when rhetorical strategies for ensuring difference are
readily available?
Sally Swain also plays on the ambiguities of Manet’s female nude; she
wholly appropriates the figure and turns it into an unequivocally male
figure by removing the breasts and adding
THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS . . . 161
facial and body hair. The transformation of female into male nude has as
one of its consequences a reassessment of the clothed male figures.
Parody, by its critical mode, destabilizes. Manet’s male figures were
defined in their masculinity by contrast with the female nude; now that
masculinity is nude there is no place for clothed male figures. By
revealing the woman to be a man, the status of the depicted men is raised
into question with the outcome that they, in turn, become women. As is
the way with parody, the process leads us to wonder whether in fact we
ever understood them in Manet’s painting to be fixed in their manhood,
whether those softly draped clothes, delicate hands, and limply arranged
thighs belonged to female bodies all along. We think of Georges Sand,
Rosa Bonheur, Romaine Brooks, and other famous female cross-dressers
and wonder if the incongruities with which Bataille and others have felt so
uncomfortable are calculated contradictions. In social terms both parodies
iron out the uncertainties in the power relations that Manet’s painting
produces; in the first, woman is excluded, and the picnic becomes an all-
male affair; in the second, the confederacy or women puts the men in the
shade.
The chief point of intervention for the parodist is, then, the masculinization
of the represented body of ictorine Meurent. The element that provoked this is, I
suggest, less the stylistic characteristics derived from Raphael (muscular thighs)
than the pe. uli. i narrative structure of the Dejeuner and, in particular, the orm
ition through which a female subject is effectively détachée through nudity and
through handling from the group and addresses the viewer. If we take ourselves,
for a moment, outside the exigencies produced by the notion that this painting
concerns the contemporary, if we forget Baudelaire and his waxed boots, we
might find that Manet’s image sits comfortably in a tradition defnu by the
expectation that there be unity of action, that imagery should function
dialectically insofar as gesture and expression may be read. This allows us to
invoke the parodists as commentators in the manner of Le Brun’s commentary
on Poussin’s The Gathering of the Manna of 1639 (Louvre, Paris). Just as
Poussins academic commentators saw no difficulty in detaching a main group
from the composition as a whole in order to consider its special effects, so the
parodist may legitimately ignore the second female figure, the boat, and other
162 MARCIA PO INTON

elements (signs of a time prior to the moment represented) and

concentrate on the discursivity of the central group.
The central group stages — though it cannot reproduce — an act of
enunciation. Manet depicts the physical accompaniments of a speech act
made before an audience. 19 The gesture of the left-hand male figure (he
who is situated to the female nude’s right) is that of speech, and since the
expressive hand is on the same plane as the nude we should understand
that it is to her that the speech is addressed. Although the ostended right
hand gestures for emphasis, the weight is on the left arm and the body is
tilted back in Etruscan or Roman dining mode. This formation produces a
powerful effect of distancing, which suggests ritualized relations at odds
with the social and the contemporary. Put quite crudely, men do not speak
to women in this way in paintings of this period either by academic artists
or by artists associated with Impressionism. Men commonly lean over the
backs of garden benches, they stand upright on terraces, they prop
themselves against trees, they discourse endlessly, but even in moments of
apparent alienation they are unremittingly seductive, inclining their
bodies, bending their ears, insinuating themselves into the magic circle of
female company, commanding attention by their proximity and their
carefully controlled and frequently hatted heads.20
Manet s nude does not respond, does not even acknowledge this act of
speech. The semantic change, strengthened by the ad locutio gesture of
the man’s right hand, meets the blank wall of female nudity. 21 The
ineffable mobility, the condition of discursivity to which history painting
aspires and which is pastiched in this speaking figure (solemn in its
enunciating as Alexander at the tent of Darius or Anthony before
Cleopatra), is bounced off the unyielding nude figure whose
extraordinarily erect posture establishes a stern vertical resistance to the
disorderly manifestations of nature and culture that spill within and around
this group. The deliberate and harsh line of this figure’s back offers no
possibility for permeation or engagement of any kind.
The masculine attributes of the nude in Manet’s painting that are
picked up in parody are necessary for the decorum of this procedure - the
act of speech . Equally, it is imperative that the figure is female. The
social narratives of the following decade seem often to clearly posit a male
speaker and a female listener or listeners.
THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS - . . i6z

Manet’s Boating of 1874 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and

Argenteuil of 1874 (Mused des Beaux Arts,Tournai) fall into this category. The
quintessential painting for this gender division is Renoir’s Bal au Moulin de la
Galette of 1876 (Mused d’Orsay, Paris) where the faces of the two women in
the foreground reflect back to the viewer the quality of enunciation delivered by
the young man whose back is toward us but whose eager forward-leaning
posture and raised left hand indicate an act of speech. But Manet’s speaker
addresses his female companion with the gesture not of a lover but of a
rhetorician. The appropriate recipient of such an address would have been male.
But equally had the auditor been male he would have had right of reply. By
making the figure female - and by making her naked - Manet provides a listener
who is addressed in a proper manner but for whom any response would be
improper. Her averted gaze does not absorb his discourse but deflects it. Nudity,
femininity, and the stern posture all combine to act as prism to this act of
speech, bouncing the imagined words out of the controlled image field and into
the viewer’s space. 1 he second man and the second woman, in their absorptive
states, are evasive and make clear to the viewer that there is no escaping this
trajectory, no evading the acute prismatic effect of the central female figure
Figures that gaze out of images are normally subordinate and work to draw
the attention of the viewer into the picture space that is occupied by a dominant
group. One thinks, for example, of Titian’s Vendvamin Family of 1543“7
(National Gallery, London), or figures in paintings by Poussin or Le Brun. Mith
Manet it is the dominant central figure that gazes out I he defining characteristic
of narrative is, as Hayden White has so amply demonstrated, clo- sure 22 That
which differentiates chronicles or inventories or other kinds of writing from
narration is the structure that ends in closure . Manet’s painting with its
titillating suggestions both of the contemporary and of epic history painting
offers a narrative about enunciation but a narrative that is structured in such a
way as to refuse closure. The prismatic effect throws out any possibility we
might, entertain that these individuals are engaged in conversation. « f we were
able to believe that they discoursed with one another in a free play of social
intercourse, that would suffice; our need as readers to have an episode, to be
rewarded with unity of action, howevei
164 MARCIA PO INTON
desultory that action, would be satisfied. What Manet does, instead, is to stage
precisely the conditions associated with the most highly developed forms of
narrative painting but to deny the necessary closing of the circle. The parodists,
by turning the woman into a man or by rendering her vocal (typically, by giving
her a balloon containing commentary on the situation) restores to the image the
symmetry of the group. And I say restore because parody works on the
occluded and the implicit. In restoring the painting’s unity — in ironing out its
incongruity — the parody also robs it of its tension. That tension is the creation
of an artist intent upon interrogating the condition of discursivity; in laying
open the terms of history paintings pact with the viewer.The Déjeuner sur
l’herbe invites us to contemplate the story of how stories get told.

NOTES

1. This essay is a bli ther development of ideas about Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur
l’herbe, which I first put forward in Chapter 6 of my book Naked Authority :
The Body in Western Painting 1830-1906 (Cambridge. 1990). I am grateful to
Paul Hayes Tucker for enabling me to rethink my position with regard to this
complex image and to all those friends who have continued to draw my
attention to parodic expositions of Manet’s theme. I am also grateful to Peter
Burton tor willingly dashing out with camera to capture Alexei Sayle before he
disappeared from the hoardings.
2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), S Rendait, trans.
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London-1988), p 18
3. A second poster, simultaneously launched, showed Alexei Sayle bursting
through a Toulouse-Lautrec image and being kissed on the cheek by a woman.
4 “4-” stands for BBC television Channel 4
5 I have to thank Thomas Crow for this witty observation
6. The first of these is printed in the American Postcard, Inc.. New York, ‘
Misguided Masterpieces the second was produced 111 England by Ian
Daniels, c. 1990. One might also mention that Picasso’s 1960s series of
drawings after the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which seem in their “mastery” so
secure from what Rosalind Krauss identifies as the rhythmic beat of an
alternative and subconscious modernism, have been recently compared to that
staple of popular culture, the flip book; Rosalind Krauss, The Optical
Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.-1993), ch 5.
7. The debates over Olympia have gone on since the painting’s first exhibition,
but they were lent particular impetus by the attention of T. J. Clark in a series
of accounts initiated with “Preliminaries to a possible treat-
THE FASCINATION WITH THIS RENDEZVOUS . . . 165

8. rnent of ‘Olympia’ in 1865,” Screen 21 (Spring 1980) and

by the continuation of this discussion in The New York
Review of Books in the form of a discussion with Françoise
Cachin.
9. Georges Bataille, Manet, A. Wainhouse and J. Emmons, trans. (New York: 1955),
p. 74.
9- T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (London: 1984), pp, 48,95.
10. Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven
and London: 1988), p. 172.
11 I use the term not in the derogatory sense of mindless borrowing (that runs close to
plagiarism) but in the sense of a practice that does not iron out ambiguities but
exposes them It differs from parody in that it involves a mixture of styles and motifs
from different sources forming a patchwork. It has the element of a game in
common with parody.
12. Nils Sandblad, Manet. Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund: 1954); George
Mauner, Manet, Peintre-Philosophe: A Study of the Painter’s Themes (University
Park* 1975), ch. 2.
13. Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” in Art in Paris 1845-62. Salons and Other
Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, J. Mayne, ed./trans. (Oxford; 1981),
p. 168.
14. Odilon Redon, A Soi Même, journal (1867-1915), Elizabeth G. Holt, trans., in From
the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth
Century. A Documentary History of Art (New York: 1966), vol. 3, pp. 493-4-
15. The locus classions on this conflict remains Albert Bonne, The Academy and
French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: 1971), but the topic remains
one that is very much alive. Art History 20, no. 1 (March 1977), which is devoted to
academies and art schools in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe,
will further the debate.
16 Gustave Courbet, Letter to a group of students, first published in Le Courrier du
Dimanche (December 29, 1861), reprinted in translation in Holt, as in note 14, pp.
351-3.
17 Jamot described Manet as ' grand artiste qui situe la réalité dans 1 irréel ; Paul
Jamot, “Extraits de l’introduction au catalogue de l’exposition Manet,” Museé de
l'Orangerie, 1932, in Pierre Cailler, ed., Manet raconté par lui même et par ses amis
(Paris: 1953), p 198.
18 It is interesting to note that the revised and extended edition of Hugh Honour and
John Fleming s A World History of Art published in 1991 features a reproduction of
the head of Manets nude female from the Dejeuner on the front of the dust jacket It
serves in a revisionist way to make a point about Manet as protomodernist in his
handling o! paint suitaces, t is, however, tempting to conclude that it was necessary
to omit the troublesome body in order to make this point.
166 MARCIA PO INTON
19. I take my definition of enunciation from Michel de Certeau’s summary, as in
note 2, p. 33, in which he points out that enunciation presupposes, first, a
realization of the linguistic system through a speech act that actualizes some of
its potential (language is real only in the act of speaking); second, an
appropriation of language by the speaker who uses it; third, the postulation of
an interlocutor (real or imagined) and thus the constitution of a relational
contract or allocation (one speaks to someone); fourth, the establishment of a
present through the act of the “I” who speaks and conjointly the existence of a
“now,” which is the presence to the world.
20. J am thinking here particularly of Manets In the Conservatory of 1879
(Nationalgalerie, Berlin).
21 In her discussion of Picasso’s series of drawings after Manet, Krauss draws
attention to the migration of genitalia around the company. It is also true to
say, however, that Picasso pays a great deal of attention to the speaking male
figure, increasing its dimensions, changing its position in relation to the other
three figures and particularly in relation to the female nude, and lengthening
the right arm.
22. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,”
Critical Inquiry 7,110. 1 (Autumn 1980), 5-29
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANET MONOGRAPHS, EXHIBITION CATALOGUES, AND IMPORTANT

STUDIES OF THE PERIOD
Adler Kathleen. Manet. Oxford: Phaidon, 1986.
Baudelaire, Charles. Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres complètes, Y.-G.
Dan- tec and Charles Pichois. eds Paris- Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961.
Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in
Nineteenth- Century France. Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1989.
Cachm, Françoise, and Charles S. Moffett. Manet 1832-1883, exhibition
catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983.
Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life. Pans in the Art of Manet and His
Followers. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Clayson, Hollis. Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist
Era. New Haven- Yale University Press, 1991.
Corbin, Alam. Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1830.
Cambridge, Mass.: k larvard University Press, 1990.
Darragon, Eric. Manet Paris: Editions Citadelles, 1991
Duret, Théodore Histoire d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre. Paris: H. Floury,
1902.
Faison, S. Lane. Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Amsterdam: Collins, 1955.
Farwell, Beatrice. Manet and the Nude: A Study in the Iconology of the Second
Empire, New York Garland Press 1981.
Fried, Michael. Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s.
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996

16
7
168 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamilton, George Heard. Manet and His Critics. New Haven- ale University
Press, 1954.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 169

Hanson, Anne Coffin. Manet and the Modem Tradition, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977.
Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism. Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. London:
Yale University Press, 1988.
Hofmann, Werner. Edouard Manet, Das Frühstück in Atelier: Augenblicke des
Nachdenkens. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.
Kreil, Alam. Manet and the Painters of Contemporary Life. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1996,
Jamot, Paul, and Georges Wildenstein. Manet. 2 vols. Paris: Beaux-Arts. 1932.
Jones, Pamela M., et al. Edouard Manet and the “Execution of Maximilian. ”
Exhibition catalogue. Providence, R.I.: List Art Center, Brown University,
1981.
Manner, George. Manet peintre-philosophe: A Study of the Painter’s Themes.
University Park. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in
Paris, 1848-1871. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Moreau-Nélaton, Etienne. Manet raconté par lui-même. 2 vols. Paris' Henri
Laurens, 1926.
Perutz, Vivien. Edouard Manet. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993.
Pointon, Marcia. Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830—1908
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Proust, Antonin. "Edouard Manet: Souvenirs,” La Revue blanche, February- May
1897,125-35,168-80,201^7, 306-15,413-24.
Edouard Manet: Souvenirs. Paris: A. Barthélemy, EL Laurens, 1913.
Rand, Harry. Manet’s Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare. Berkeley:
University of California Press. 1987.
Reft, Theodore. Manet and Modern Paris. Exhibition catalogue. Washington,
D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982.
Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism, 4th ed. New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1973.
Richardson, John. Manet. Oxford: Phaidon, 1967.
Roos, Jane. Early Impressionism and the French State. Nev/ York- Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Rouart, Dennis, and Daniel Wildenstein. Edouard Manet: Catalogue Raisonné.
Lausanne-Bibliothèque des Art, 1975.
Rubin, James H. Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Sandblad, Nils Gosta. Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception Lund: C.W.
K.
Gleerup, 1954.
170 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tibarant Adolphe. Manet et ses oeuvres. Paris- Gallimard 1947,

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 171

Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette Origins of Impressionism. Exhibition

catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.
Wilson-Bareau, Juliet. The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the
Artist’s Working Processes. Exhibition catalogue. London: The Courtauld
Galleries,
1986.
Manet:“'The Execution of Maximilian”; Painting, Politics and Censorship.
Exhibition catalogue. London- National Gallery, 1992.
Zola, Emile. Edouard Manet: Etude biographie et critique. Paris: Dentu, 1867;
reprinted in Zola, Mes Haines. Paris: Bernouard, 1928

IMPORTANT CRITICAL STUDIES

Andersen, Wayne. Manet and the Judgment of Paris,” Art News 72, no. 2
(February 1973), 63 -9.
Armstrong, Carol. “Manet/Manette: Encolormg the I/Eye,” Stanford Humanities
Reviens 5, nos' 2—3 (Spring 1992), 1—46.
Bourdieu, Pierre.'‘Manet and the Institutionalization of Anomie,” 'The Field of
Cultural Production. New York- Columbia University Press, 1973, pp. 238-
53.
Carrier, David.‘‘Manet and His Interpreters,” Art History 8 (September 1985),
320-35.
Dunlop, Ian. “The Salon des Refuses (1863),” in The Shock of the New. New
York: American Heritage Press, 1972, pp. 10-53.
Egan, Patricia. “Poesia and the ‘Fête Champêtre’,” Art Bulletin 61, no. 4
(December 1959). 302-13.
“Manets Bathers,' Arts Magazine 54, no. 9 (May 1980), 124—33.
“Manets ‘Espada’ and Marcantomo,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 2
(1969), 1-97-207.
“Manet’s ‘Nymphe surprise’,” Burlington Magazine 127 (April 1975), 244-9.
Fried, Michael. “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art 1859-1865,” Artforum 7
(March 1969), 28-82.
“Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past m Baudelaire and
Manet,” Critical Inquiry 10 (March 1984), 510-42.
Haskell, Francis. “Giorgione’s ‘Concert champêtre and Its Admirers, Past and
Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987, pp. 141-52.
Hauptman, William. “Some new nineteenth-century references to Giorgione’s
‘Tempesta’,” Burlington Magazine 136 (February 1994), 78-82.
172 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howard, Seymour. “Early Manet and Artful Error: Foundations of Anti-Illusion

in Modern Painting,” Art Journal 37 (Fall 1977), 14-21.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 173

Huston, Lome. “Le Salon et les expositions d’art: réflexions à partir de

l’expérience de Louis Martinet (1861—1865),” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 116
(July-August 1990), 45-50.
Hyslop, Lois Boe, and Frances E. Hyslop. Baudelaire and Manet: A
Reappraisal,” in Lois Boe Hyslop, ed., Baudelaire as a Love Poet and Other
Essays.
University Park Pennsylvania State Press, 1969, 87—130.
Jamot, Paul. “The First Version of Manets ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’,” Burlington
Magazine 58, no. 339 (June 1931), 299-300.
Krauss, Rosalind E. “Manet's ‘Nymph Surprised’,” Burlington Magazine 109
(November 1967), 622-7.
Kreil, Alan. “Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ in the ‘Salon des Refusés’: A
Reappraisal,” The Art Bulletin 65 (June 198 3), 316-20.
Lajer-Burchart, Ewa. “Modernity and the Conditions of Disguise: Manet’s
‘Absinthe Drinker’,” Art Journal 45 (Spring 1985), 18-25.
Lipton, Eunice. “Manet. A Radicalized Female Imagery,” Artforum 13 (March
1975), 48—53-
Locke, Nancy. “New Documentary Information on Manet’s ‘Portrait of the
Artist’s Parents’,’ Burlington Magazine 133 (April 1991), 249-52.
Mesnil, Giacomo. “‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ di Manet ed II Concerto campestre’
di Giorgione,’ L’Arte, N S. 5 (1934), 250-7
Nochhn, Linda. “The Invention of the Avant-Garde in France - 1830-80,” Art
News Annual 34 (1968), 11-18; reprinted in Linda Nochlin, The Politics of
Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society. New York: Harper and
Row, 1989, pp. 1-13.
Nord, Philip. ‘ Manet and Radical Politics,’"Journal of Interdisciplinary History
19, no 3 (Winter 1989), 447-80.
Pauli, Gustave. “Raphael und Manet,” Monatschefte fur Kunstwissenschaft 1
(January-February 1908), 53—5
Reff, Theodore. “Courbet and Manet,” Arts Magazine 54 (March 1980), 98-103.
“Manet and Paris: Another Judgment,’ ’ Artnews 72, no. 8 (October 1973), 50
—6.
“Manet’s Sources: A Critical Evaluation,” Artjorum 8 (September 1969), 40-
8.
Shaw; Jennifer L. “The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of
1863,” Art History 14, no. 4 (December 1991), 540-57.
Van Liere, Eldon N. “Solutions to Dissolutions: The Bather in Nineteenth-
Century French Painting,” Arts Magazine 54, no. 9 (May 1980), 104-14.
Wechsler, Judith. “An Apéritif to Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’,” Gazette des
174 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beaux-Arts 91 (January 1978), 32—4

Wildenstein, Darnel.“Le Salon des Refüsés de 1863: catalogue et documents,”
Gazette des Beaux-Arts 66 (September 1965), 125—52.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
17
5
Wilson, Mary G. “Edouard Manet’s ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. An Allegory of
Choice: Some Further Conclusions,” Arts Magazine 54, no. 5 (January 1980),
162-7.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM OF LE DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE AND

THE SALON OF 1863 CITED IN THE TEXT

(For additional references, see Christopher Parsons and Martha Ward, A

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178 BIBLIOGRAPHY

(August 1863), pp. 311-6; (September 1863), pp. 354-5;

(October 1863), p. 392-5; (November 1863), pp. 428-34.
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1863), pp. 363-92.
 INDEX

Academy. French, 159 Blin, François, 46

Actaeon. See Diana and Actaeon. Bois de Boulogne, 92
Alexander and Darius, 162 Bonapartist regime, 46,49-50, 54,77.159. See
Amaury-Duval, Eugène Emmanuel, 46 also
Ambigu théâtre, 54 Napoleon HI; Second Empire.
Andersen. Wayne, 23 Bonheur, Rosa, 161
Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. 43 Boucher, François, 54, 140
Anthony and Cleopatra, 162 La Partie quarter, engraving after Watteau,
Antigna, Alexandre, 76 140
After the Bath (Fig. 22), 76 Bouguereau, Adolphe-William. 46
Aphrodite, 51. See also Venuses. Bougival, 92
Appert, Eugène, 46 Boumol, Bathlid, 50
Argenteuil, 12,14,92 Bovary. Emma, 56. See also Flaubert, Madame
L’Artiste, 60 Bovary.
Asnières, 56 BowWowWow, 153
Astarte, 129 Go Wild in the Country (Fig. 34), 153,
As truc, Zacharie, 41-42,48, 59,101,136 Briguiboul, Marcel, 46
Athena, 20 Brooks, Romaine. 161
Brunet, Eugène, 136
Baillarger,Jules, 123 Buloz, François, 50
Balzac, Honoré de, 26 Burckhardt, Jacob, 126
Barrière,Théodore. 54 Cicerone, 126
Bataille. Georges, 155-8,161 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 128
Baudelaire, Charles, 15,26, 40,42,61,63,105- Beppo, 128
8, in, 123, 135-6,159,161
Les Fleurs du Mai, 61 Cabanel, Alexandre, 38,44,46-51, 54-
The Painter of Modem Life, 106—8
55,62.79, 160
Naissance, de Vénus (Birth of Venus') (Fig. 16),
Baudry, Paul, 38,467-51, 54-56,62
La Perle ct la vague (The Pearl and the Wave), 38, 46-49, 55
(Fig. 17), 38,46-50, 54-56 Nymph Carried Off by a Faun, 79
Bernadotte, Charles, 134 Cabanis. Pierre-Jean-George, 123
Bertall (Charles Albert d Arnoux), 108 Cachin, Françoise, 21-22
Beulé, Ernest, 51 Cadart, Alfred, 41
Blanc, Charles, 130-1 Canova, Antonio, 53
Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, 130 Carracci Annibale, 136
Carte de visite (Fig. 21), 54-55
18
0
 181 INDEX

Castagnary Jules, 18.42,49, 82

 182 INDEX

CathoEc press, 40, 50-51 Du Pays, A. J., 52

CathoEc socialism, 51 Duran ty, Edmond, 123
Censorship trials of 1850s, 40 Dürer, Albrecht, 159
Cézanne, Paul, 7,119-22,129-30,133,135 Melancholia, 159
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Fig. 4), 120—2,133, Duret, Théodore, 93,101
Champfleury (fuies Fleury), 41 Dutch still life, 102
Champs-Elysées, 14,132
Chesneau, Ernest, 43-44, 85,132 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 159
Christian art, 51 Ehrmann, François, 46
Clark,Timothy J., 104 -5, IZ6 Elgin Marbles, 53
Clarac, Charles Comte de, 53 Enault, Louis, 44
Cleopatra. See Anthony and Cleopatra. L’Esprit publique, 40
Closerie de Lilas, 43 Etienne, Louis, 42, 85
Cogmet, Léon, 44 Etruscan art, 162
Le Constitutionnel, 40 Eugénie, Empress of France, 46
Cooper, Douglas, 2 Euthias, 51
Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 49 Eve, 129
Le Correspondant, 40
Courbet, Gustave, 20-22,26, 42, 50,77,79, 81, Faculté de Medicine, 123
124-5,158-60 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 14,41,101
Bathing Women, 77, 81 Pastoral Concert, after Giorgione/Titian, 14
Hunt Picnic (Fig. IZ), 21-22, Faubourg-St. Marceau, 44
Retour de la conference (Return of the Conference), Farwell, Beatrice, 20
50 Faure, Jules, 7
Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer)
Ferenczi, Sandor, 133
(Fig. 12), 20-22, 79, 125 Feydeau, Ernest, 57-58.61
Un Début à l’opéra, 58
Le Courrier artistique, 40-41
Court of the First Instance of the Seine, Fanny, 57
15,133 Le Figaro, 40, 42
Couture,Thomas, 12,14,126 Fine Arts Quarterly, 43
Crow,Thomas, 140 Flandrin, Hippolyte, 41
Cupid, 140 Flaubert, Gustave, 26,48, 56—58, 6r, 63
Cuvilher-Fleury, Alfred-Auguste, 56 Madame Bovary, 48, 56-57,61
Fleury, Antoine, 60
Daly, César, 51 Florence, Italy, 94.130
Danae, 49 Fornarina, 62
Darius. See Alexander and Darius. Forster, Ernst, 126—7,129
Darwin, Charles, 125 Fournier, Edmond (Manets uncle), 134
Decameron, 131 La France, 40,78
Degas. Edgar, 13,160 Franco-Prussian War, 44,140
Delacroix, Eugène, 1,159 French Revolution, 80-81
Women of Algiers, 1 Freud, Sigmund, 122,133,136,138
Delila, 49 Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 138
Derrida,Jacques, 138 "A Child Is Being Beaten,’ 122
Desnoyers, Carle, 42 Fried, Michael, 20,119,132,140
Desnoyers, Fernand, 42
Devéria, Achille. 94 Galatea, 49
Diana and Actaeon, 76 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 41
Direc tory period, 84 Gauguin, Paul, 7
Dreams and unconscious phenomena, 120- Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where
4,130, 132-3,138-9 Are We Going? (Fig 5), 7
Du Camp, Maxime, 38. 48—50, 54,79—81, Gautier,Théophile, 40,46,48, 50, 52, 59
85-86 La Gazette de France, 40
Dumas fils, Alexandre, 54 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 40
Dumesml, Alfred, 60
 INDEX T
77
Gennevilliers, 24,133—4,136 Italy. 41,48,127. See also Renaissance;
Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 51—52,61, 79, 84 Florence;
Phryné devant le tribunal (Phryne Before the Tri- Venice
bunal ) (Fig, 20), 51,61, 84
Jamot, Paul, 159
Socrates Seeking Alcibiades inAspasia’s House, 79
Janus, in
Giorgione, 12—14,26,41 43, 59-61,78,94 120, 57
Le Journal des Débats,
126-9, i3i-3> 138.158 Julian, Rodolphe 44. 46
Pastoral Concert (Fig 8), 12-14, 26 43, 59-61, Le Lever (The Awakening), 44,46 caricature oft
78,94,109,126,131-3,139 45
Tempesta {The Tempest) (a.k.a. The Family of
Giorgione), 126—9,132—3,139 Koëlla, Léon 134. See Léon Leenhoff
Kugler Franz, 60
Glaize. August, 79-80, 85 Kreil, Alan, 41, 84
Misery the Procuress (Fig. 24), 79-80, 85
Gleyre. Charles, 126 Laborde, Léon de, zi
Tempesta, drawing after Giorgione, 126 Lacan,Jacques, 122,138
Goldstein, Jan, 123 Lagrange, Léon, 52
Goncourt Brothers (Edmond and Jules), 54, Lagrène.Jean, 136
58, 62-63, 87 Lajer-Burchatth, Ewa, 136
La Fille Elisa, 63 Lansac, François-Emile, 46
Larousse, Pierre, 83
Germinie Lacerteux, 58,63
Dictionnaire, 83
Idées'et sensations, 58
Latin Quarter. See Quartier Latin.
Manette Salomon, 62—63, 87 Laverdant, Désiré, 51, 53
Goya, Francisco, de 42 Le Mémoriale Catholique, 51
Grand Palais. 14 LeBnm. Jean-Baptiste, i6r, 163
Grandville. J. J. (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), Leda, 50
124 Great Britain, 53,152. See also London. Leenhoff. Ferdinand (Manet’s brother-m-law),
Greece, ancient civilization art. religion, 51— 24, 90,93,110-1,126,133,135,157.
54 See also Manet,Le Déjeuner figures in.
Guérard, Eugène 77,79, 82 Leenhoff, Léon (Minets son?), 93,98,100-1,
Long Live Wine, Long Lave the Fruit Divine (from 134-7
the series Les Vacances) (Fig. 23), Leenhoff Suzanne (Manet’s wife), 24,93,134-7
77, 82 Legros, Alphonse, 41
Guignol théâtre, 50 Leonardo da Vinci, 53, 130
Guys. Constantin. 106—8 Mono Eisa, 53
Lockroy, Edouard, 41-42,48
Hamerton, Philip, 43,47, 59 London, 51
Hanson, Anne, 20, 129 Louis XVIII, 53
Haskell, Francis, 59 Louvet, Arthur, 42-44
Hauptman, William, 126 Louvre 14,24, 59,78,90.93-94,106-7, 109,
Heine, Heinrich, 49 126-7, HL 1.39
Holy Land, 41
Houssaye, Arsène, 60 Manet. Auguste (Manet’s father), 14-15,133-7
Husson, Hyacinthe, 51 Manet, Edouard
H^perides, 52 academic education, 134 art education,
12,14,126 biographies, 38 family estate.
He Saint Ouen, 24 124.133-6 gallery shows, 41 paintings
Impressionism. 158,162 The Absinthe Drinker (Fig. 9), 15,25,136
L'Indépendance belge, 40 Argenteuil, 163
Ingres. Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 54,62,140 Boating, 163
The Source, 54
Boy with Dog, 136
I7 8 INDEX

Boy with a Sword, 137

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the
Grass) (Fig. 1):
 I7 8 INDEX

Manet (Continued) prints, 94,136

alternate titles, 6, 38,42,76, 84,120,140 Salon of 186 k award, 16,40 travel,
canvas size, 11-12,14 76 14,94,126,131
critical response to, l, 5,7, n, iz, 18-19, Manet, Eugène (Manet’s brother), 24,90,93,
24-25, 38,40-44,47-48, 59, 76,78- rot, 109—11,126,131,133—7. See
79, 84-87, 105, 125, IZ2, 157 also Manet, Le Déjeuner ..., figures in.
figures in, 5,10-11,14,19-20,23-24,26, Manet, Eugéme-Désirée Fournier (Manet's
38,43-44,46, 56,61-62,76, 8r, 84, mother), 134,137
90-92,96,119, l2i, 125,132-3,135, Manet, Gustave (Manet’s brother),
137-9,141,155,157-8,160-3. See also 24,90,93,101, 109, no-n,
Ferdinand Leenhoff: Eugène Manet; 119,126,133-8,157
Gustave Manet; Victorine Meurent. See also Manet, Le Dejeuner .... figures in.
first exhibited, 7,10. See also Salon des Manet,Julie (Eugène Manet’s daughter), 137
Refùsés. Manet, Suzanne Leenhoff (Manet’s wife). See
first sold, 7 Suzanne Leenhoff.
parody (as parody and parodied) (Figs. Mantz, Paul, 131—2
33-36)» 26, 87,152-61,164 Marcellin (Emile Planat) (Figs. 18-19), 45—
pentimenti, 24 47
preparatory works for, 6,24 Martinet, Louis, 41
selling price and Manet’s declared Matisse, Henri, 7
value, 7,14,140 Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (Fig 6), 7
sexual overtones, 10,23,43—44, 59,61, Manner, Georges, 159
63, 76, 84,120,140,158 Maury, Alfred, 51,124,132
sources for, 11-12,14,19-24,76— Le Sommeil et les rêves. Etudes psychologiques sur
77,79, 94,119-20,126-9,131,133- ces phénomènes, 124
4,138-40. 158, ik>o, 163
Mazerolles, Joseph-Alexis, 46
spectator of, 2,10,62,76, 81-2,86,120,
Mechanical reproductions, 20,23,76—
137-9,141,163-4
79,94,109, ni, 120,126—7,
still life in, 22,26, 82,90,121,158
136.140. See also Photography.
symbolism 20,23, 86
Ménilmontint 41
variations on by other artists (Figs. 2—
Mérimée, Prosper, 51
4, 33-36), 1-4,6-7.119-22,152-8, Fishing
Merlet, Gustave, 58
(Fig. 14), 22-23,136-7 The Fifer (Fig. 28),
Meurent,Victorine (Manet’s model), 24—25,
98,100-2 Gare Saint-Lazare (Fig. 31), 102
61-62,92-96,98,100-6.108-n, 119-
Mlle V... in the Costume o f an Espada (Fig 10),
21,126,128,132-3,135-9,141,
17-18,93,95-96,102,104, 119-
152,157,160-1. See also Manet, Le
20,136-8 Déjeuner .... figures in.
Music in the Tuileries (Fig. 30), 101,136—7 Meynier, Jules Joseph, 46
Tie Nymph Surprised, 23—24,61, 83 Michelangelo, 130
The Old Musician, 94,135 Middle East, 41
Olympia, (Fig. 15), 24,63,94,103-6,137, Ministry of Justice, 15
140,154—7,160 Mocquard, Jean-François, 54
Philosopher, 136 Le Monde illustré, 41
Portrait ofM. and Mme. Auguste Manet, 15,26 Mondiaux, Didier de, 43,48
Self-Portrait, 101 Monet, Claude, 7,13,135,160
The Spanish Singer, 15-6,26.40,95 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)
(Fig. Z), 7,160
The Street Singer (Fig. 27), 95,100,102, 136-
Le Moniteur universel, 40, 57
7
Young Lady in 1866 (Fig. 29), 101-2,137 Montégut, Emile, 57—58
Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, 18,93, Montlaur, Eugène de, 54
119-20,136-8 Monvoisin, Raymond-Auguste- Quinsac, 46
Morion, 77
 I7 8 INDEX

Oarsmen of the Seine, Port of Call at Asnières, 77

Mount Ida, 19
Miirger, Henri, 26,62
Scènes de la vie de Bohème, 62
 INDEX 17
9
Musée d’Orsay, 154 Pre-Raphaelites, 43,129
Musées des familles. 40 Prix de Rome, 46
Musset, Alfred de, 44 Prostitution, 43-44,49, 51, 54. 59,61,63, 8o,
Rolla, 44 84-86.104-5,107-8. in, 120,157
Proudhon, P J., 49-50, 53
Napoleon III, 18,41.46.48, 50, $6. See also Proust, Antonin, 12-13.18.101,126-7
Bona- partist regime; Second Psychology, interest in in nineteenth-century
Empire. France, 122-4
Nochlin, Linda, 21, 87 Puritanism. See Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.

Offenbach, Jacques, 26.136 Quartier Latin. 85

Ollivier, Emile, 131-2 Quatremère. Quincy de, 53
Omphale, 49
L’Opinion nationale, 40 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 19—
20,78,94.109,126, 133,160
Orient, 47, 49,79
Judgment of Paris, engraving after Raphael
Orléans museum, 77
(Fig. 11),
Palais de 1’Industrie, 14 19.78,94.109,126,133.160
Palazzo Manfrin, 126 Raphael, 19-20,26,48,62,78,94,101,106,126,
Paris Commune, 46 138-9,160-1
Paris. 7,12,14-16, 27,41. 51, 53-54,76. 85-86, Galatea, 49
' 106-7, l22,124, IZZ, 153-4 Judgment of Paris, 19, 26,78,94,109.126,139,
Paris (mythological figure), 62,91 160. See also Raimondi,Judgment of
La Patrie , 40 Paris.
Paul, Adrien, 42-43, 79. 85,132 23
The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes,
Le Pays, 40 School of Athens, 101
Penley, Constance, 122 Realism, 40-43,48. 57-59,62-63,105,107,124-
Perrot, Phillipe, 132 5, 137-8,158-9
Pesme. 55 Redon. Odilon, 124.159
Nude académie (Fig. 21), 54 Renan. Ernst, 41
Le Petit Journal, 40, 42 Renaissance. Italian, 14,26, 54,90-
Photography, 40, 54-58,120. See also 91,94,106,129, 130
Mechanical reproductions. Renoir, Pierre-Auguste. 135,160,163
Phryne, 51—52, 84. See also Gérôme, Phryné Bal au Moulin de la Galette, 163
devant le tribunal. Revue contemporaine, 40
Picard, Noel. 85—86
Revue des Deux Mondes, 40,48, 50
Picasso, Pablo, 1-4.6-7,20,27,76
Déjeuner Series, 1.4,6-7
La Revue du Monde Catholique, 50
La Revue de Paris, 48
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe after Manet (Fig. 2), 1
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, (Fig. 7), 7 La Revue de progrès, 40
variations on Old Masters, 1,28,76 Revue française, 40
Pinard, Ernest, 56 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 60
Pissarro. Camille. 135 Rialle, Girard de, 44
Polichinelle, 44 Rigolboche, 54
Pontmartin. Alphonse de. 54, 57 Rigollot, Marc-Jérôme, 60,131
Pope Pius IX. 48 Roman art, 53,162
Pompilius, Le Capitaine, 42 Ronchaud, Louis de. 51
Poussin. Nicolas, 1,161,163 Rossetti. Dante Gabriel, 129
The Gathering of the Manna, 161 Rubens. Peter Paul, 14,96
Rue Bréda, 49. See also Prostitution.
Triumph of Pan, 1
Pradier, James, 54, 56 Saint Petersburg, 51
Praxiteles, 51, 53
 180 INDEX

Saint-Simonian, 41
Sainte-Beuve. Charles-Augustin, 57
Saint John, 23
Salon des Vénuses. 46
Salons of Paris, 14—15,18,38.4I—4-2,
55,75~76,84,87
 181 INDEX

Salon juries, 15,18, 26,41-42,46.61,126,136 Partie carrée, 84

Salon of 1849, 76 Tintoretto, 14
Salon of 1857, 20,79 Titian. 14,22,48, 54, 59,78.94,106-8,126
Salon of 1859, 15,136 Pastoral Concert (Fig 8), 59,78,94.126,131-3,
Salon of 1861, 15-16, 40, 51,79, 84 139
Salon of 1863, 17-18, 38-39,41-42,46-50, Vcndramin Family, 163
53, 61,63,86 Venus of Urbino, 94,105,155
press caricature of (Fig. 19), 46 Virgin with a White Rabbit, 22
Salon des Refusés (1863), 18, 24, 38- Titian, follower of. Trtple Portrait, 128
44.46,48. Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 152
50, 86,93,119,136-8 Tribunal de la première instance. See Court of
press caricature of (Fig. 18), 44 the First Instance of the Seine.
Salon of 1865, 105,108 Tuileries Gardens, 136
Salon of 1870. 84 S>
Le Salon, 41 Ullman, Stephen, 56
Sand, Georges, 161
Sandblad, Nils, 159 van Loo, Carle, 21
Sardou,Victor, 54 Halt in the Hunt, 21
Sayle, Alexei, 152,157,160 Vasari, Giorgio, 60,62,128
Advertisement for Alexei Sayle in Paris (Fig. Velâzquez, Diego, 1,14. 101—2
33), 152,157-8.160 Las Memnas, 1,101
Schapiro, Meyer, 120 Venereal disease, 80-81
Schutzenberger, Louis-Frédéric, 46 Venice, 59,90,126-7,129-32
Second Empire. 50, 51, 53. See also Napoleon Venuses, 38-39,46-56, 84,140. See also
III; individual works by Baudry,
Bonapartist regime. Cabanel, Giorgione, Raphael,
Seine River, 12-13,24,91-92,155 Raimondi,Titian; Salon of 1863.
Sénard, Marc Antoine. 56 La Vie parisienne, 40. 46—47
Shakespeare, William, 49 Viel-Castel. Horace Comte de, 78, 85
Le Siècle, 40.79 Vienna, 51
Siege of Paris, 140 Vignon, Claude (Noémie Cadiot), 50. 52
Simmonds, Posy, 153,157 Virgin Mary, 129
Guardian cartoon (Fig. 35), 153,157 Vitet, Ludovic, 51
Société des Aquafortistes. 41 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 20,23,78.91,94-
Société Médico-Psychologique, 123 95.104, 140
Spanish still life, 102 La Partie quarrée, 140
Spiritualism, 123,125 The Village Girl, 23
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 60,130 White, Hayden, 163
Stevens, Alfred, 42, 82 Wmcklemann,Johann, 106
Morning in the Country (Fig. 25), 82 Wright, Jocasta. 153
Stevens, Arthur, 42-43,49
Suzanna (at the bath), 23, 53,61 Zola, Emile, 59, 62,86,101,122,130
Swain, Sally, 153,157,160-1 Les Confessions de Claude, 62-63
Mrs. Manet Entertains in the Garden (Fig. z6), L’Oeuvre, 86
153,157.160-1 Pot-Bouille, 130
Sweden, 134

Le Temps, 40
Le Théâtre,40
Thoré,Théophile, 42-43,46,49, 52—54,78
Tissot, James, 84
 MASTERPIECES OF WESTERN PAINTING

E
DOUARD MANET’S controversial painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is one of the
best known images in French art. The subject of critical analysis for more than a
century, it still defies singular interpretations.
This book offers six different readings of the painting. Based on new ideas about its context,
production, meaning, and reception, these essays, written specially for this volume by the
leading scholars of French incorporate close examinations of its radical >iv le and nox el vaut
historical developments and archival material, as well as evidence that prompts psychological
inquiries. Shedding new artist and the touchstone work of modernism, Manet's ‘Le Dé jeu
l'herbe" also introduces readers to current methodologies in art to the multiple ways this
complex painting can be framed.

PAUL HAYES TUCKER is Professor of

Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is CAMBREB
the author of Monet in the 90s: The Series Paintings and
Claude Monet, Life and Art. ISBN 0-52'
Cover illustration: Edouard Manet, le Déjeunur sur Photo: Courtesy Art
Resource, New York.
Cover design: Jeffrey J. tavilie