Luncheon on the Grass

A nude woman sits at a picnic with two fully dressed young men in a leafy glade, calmly meeting the viewer's eye as if nothing were amiss, a second woman bathing in the stream behind. Manet borrowed the grouping from Renaissance prints but rendered it in flat, modern paint and an unsettling contemporary frankness. Rejected by the official Salon, Luncheon on the Grass became the sensation of the 1863 Salon des Refuses and a manifesto of the new painting. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, it announced Manet, with his Olympia of the same year, as the herald of modern art.