Picnic (detail)

This image is a detail from the central fragment of Claude Monet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), the huge picnic scene he painted in 1865–66 and later cut apart. The fragment, 248.7 × 218 cm, is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (RF 1987 12), and the detail shows its lower middle: the picnic cloth, a bearded man and a young woman in a white polka-dot dress.

Which part of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe is this?

Two pieces of the original canvas survive, both at the Orsay. The tall left fragment, 418 × 150 cm, shows two standing men and two women in a forest clearing. The central fragment, which this detail comes from, holds the core of the party seated around the cloth. The crop here cuts off the standing figures above and the full width of the group, so it reads almost as a separate genre scene of lunch in the woods.

What you are looking at

At the center sits the young woman in a white summer dress dotted with black, a black ribbon tight at her throat and her reddish-blond hair pulled back. She leans slightly forward, one hand resting on a plate at the edge of the cloth, and looks off to the right with a slightly guarded expression. Behind her, a second woman in a brown dress trimmed with blue ribbons sits half hidden.

To the left, a stout bearded man in a dark jacket reclines on one elbow, his face flushed and turned to the side. At the far left edge, a fold of beige fabric belongs to another figure cut by the crop, and at upper right a man's arm reaches into the scene.

The meal is laid out in the foreground. On the white cloth stand a roast fowl on a plate, a tall raised pie with a browned, fluted crust, dark wine bottles, an upturned glass, clean plates, and a pile of fruit that includes peaches and grapes. These are painted with appetite and speed: the pie is a few curved strokes of ocher and brown, the bottles a stripe of near-black with one white highlight.

Light through leaves

The most modern thing in the detail is the light. Sun filtering through the trees falls on the cloth and the white dress in irregular bright patches, and Monet paints them as flat, separate dabs of near-white with no softening into the folds. The shadows between them are cool blue-gray rather than brown. The faces, by contrast, sit in mild shade.

That is the problem the whole picture set out to solve: how to paint figures in real outdoor light at the scale of a history painting. That flat, high-keyed handling of sunlight is what conservative critics would later attack in Impressionism.

Who are the figures?

Camille Doncieux, who later married Monet, and Bazille posed for several of the figures in the full composition. The bearded man has often been identified as Gustave Courbet, who visited Monet at Chailly while he worked and is said to have advised him, but the identification is not certain. The faces are types more than portraits.

The picture it comes from

Monet began Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1865 at Chailly, at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, near the motifs of Le Pavé de Chailly and The Bodmer Oak. He meant it for the Salon of 1866 as a modern-life answer to Manet's scandalous picture of the same title: a dozen life-size figures in fashionable dress on a canvas some four by six meters. He worked it up in his Paris studio over the winter, but could not finish it in time, and sent Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress) to the Salon instead.

In 1878 he left the rolled canvas with a landlord at Argenteuil as security for unpaid rent. When he recovered it in the 1880s, damp had damaged it, and he cut it apart, keeping the sections that could be saved. The whole composition survives only in the smaller sketch in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, The Picnic.

Where to see it

Both surviving fragments hang together at the Musée d'Orsay; see the central fragment in full and the two fragments side by side. The next year Claude Monet painted Women in the Garden fully outdoors, also now at the Orsay. Our guide to Monet at the Musée d'Orsay covers the rest of the collection.