Luncheon on the Grass Edouard Manet

Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe) by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas 1863, is a landscape painting of four persons having an afternoon picnic in a forest glade surrounded by dark trees and foliage. Art historians often cite the painting as the landmark beginning of modern art for its flattened forms, painterly technique, and "shocking" modern subject matter, and the picture elicited great controversy on its first showing. For the female subjects, Manet employed his famous model Victorine Meurent and wife Suzanne, vividly contrasting them against their male companions. The composition was transposed from a Renaissance engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi designed by Raphael, further stoking the notoriety of the painting. The stark contrasts of light and dark, sketchy painting technique, and matter of fact realism of the flattened composition mark Luncheon on the Grass as one of the most important paintings of the 19th century, influencing many subsequent generations of modern artists. Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French realist painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement whose controversial paintings marked the founding of modern art. Pursuing art at a young age, Manet studied for 6 years under the academic painter Thomas Couture, and on trips abroad encountered the Dutch masters as well as the Spanish painters Velazquez and Goya. Opening his own studio in Paris, Manet produced many paintings under the influence of the Realism of Courbet, painting scenes from modern life. His masterpieces Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia of 1863 aroused great controversy, and though the artist continued to exhibit in the official Paris Salon he befriended Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other key Impressionist painters. Painting in a loose, sketchy manner of painterly brush strokes and flattened forms which some found to be unfinished, Manet produced many scenes of bohemian cafe nightlife, journalistic scenes of wars and current events, as well subjects from the streets of Paris with such a spontaneity and compositional innovation that they made a lasting influence on younger generations of artists and enshrined him as the true "painter of modern life". Though the artist died young, Manet created paintings that were the lodestone and rallying point for the school of Impressionism and the founders of modern painting.