Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (two surviving fragments)

What you are looking at

The image here reunites two surviving pieces of one enormous painting. On the left, a tall narrow strip: a man in a dark suit and bowler hat stands under a canopy of beech leaves, beside two women in voluminous crinolines, one in grey trimmed with red, the other in a creamy brown, seen from behind. On the right, the central fragment: a white cloth spread on the grass with bread, a pie, fruit, bottles and plates; a bearded man in black reclining at its edge; a woman in a spotted white dress seated on the ground reaching for a plate; and behind them a woman lifting her arm and a tall bearded man in a grey suit and hat. Sunlight breaks through the leaves and lands in bright patches on the cloth and the dresses.

The grey areas in the composite mark what is missing. The original canvas was about 4 by 6 meters, one of the largest paintings of its time by a young artist.

Monet's ambition

In 1863 Édouard Manet had caused a scandal with his own Déjeuner sur l'herbe, which put a naked woman among clothed men at a picnic. Monet, then in his mid-twenties, answered it in 1865 with a picnic of entirely clothed, fashionable modern people, painted life-size and out of doors. His aim was to bring the scale of history painting to an everyday scene and to show real sunlight falling through real trees. He intended it for the Salon of 1866.

He worked in the forest of Fontainebleau near Chailly, making studies from life, and then transferred them to the vast canvas in the studio. His friend the painter Frédéric Bazille posed for several of the men; Camille Doncieux, later Monet's wife, posed for women in the group. The bearded man reclining at the center has traditionally been identified with Gustave Courbet, who visited Monet while he worked. Monet underestimated the task; the painting was not ready in time, and he sent instead the portrait Camille (Woman in the Green Dress), which was a success.

Why it is in pieces

The unfinished canvas came with Monet to Argenteuil. Short of money in 1878, he left it with his landlord as security against unpaid rent. When he was able to recover it, years later, it had been rolled up in a damp cellar and was badly damaged by mold.

Monet cut away the ruined parts and kept the best-preserved sections. Two fragments survive: the left part and the central part. The right section is lost.

A smaller version in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, once thought to be a preparatory sketch and now considered a later repetition, shows how the complete composition looked, with about a dozen figures. It is the best guide to what is missing.

Close looking

The light is the revolution here. Look at the tablecloth: it is not white but a field of pale blue shadows with bright, almost yellow patches where the sun breaks through. The woman in the spotted dress sits partly in shade and partly in light, and Monet paints the spots in both conditions with different colors. In the left fragment, the leaves overhead are laid in with thick, flat strokes of green and yellow, a sign of the broad, quick handling that would become Impressionism.

The still life is a pleasure in its own right: a pie with a browned crust, a basket, peaches and grapes, dark wine bottles throwing reflections onto the cloth. Then notice the figures' poses: they are caught mid-gesture, turning, reaching, talking, without the arranged quality of a Salon composition.

Reading the two fragments together

Seen side by side, as in the image on this page, the two fragments show how Monet staged the scene. The left strip is mostly vertical: tall trunks, standing figures, the long fall of the crinolines. The central fragment spreads out horizontally along the white cloth. The figures in the left fragment have their backs to us or look away, as though just arriving, while those in the center are settled, eating and talking. Between them the original painting had a gap of grass and trees, now lost, and the Pushkin version shows a second group to the right, including a figure leaning against a tree.

The fragments also show the canvas's history. Their edges are cut straight through figures and foliage, and parts of the surface still bear the scars of damp and paint loss, reminders that this ambitious picture survived only by being cut apart.

Legacy

Although it failed in its own time, the project changed Monet's direction. The lessons he learned about painting figures in sunlight went straight into Women in the Garden (1866), which he painted outdoors in a trench so he could reach the top of the canvas. Art historians now treat the fragments as one of the founding works of Impressionism.

Related works

See the catalogue's pages on the central fragment, Picnic (detail) and The Picnic, and the wider selection in Famous Monet Paintings.

Where to see it

Both fragments are in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where they are usually displayed together in the Impressionist galleries so visitors can imagine the original scale.