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EDOUARD MANET
The Picnic/Dejeuner sur I'herbe (1863)
Oil on canvas, 208cm X 264cm/82in X 104in

In the course of his career, Manet directed the subject matter of Realist painting away from rural life towards the modern urban life of Paris. Early in his work, Manet developed a slurred, wet-in-wet technique of mixing colors directly on the canvas. He also suppressed middle tones and boldly stressed areas of light and dark. For this. he chose a strong, full-faced light source to eliminate half-tones and create flattened planes of light and shade. Manet's early subjects show the influence of Spanish painting, particularly Velazquez, and reflect an awareness of contemporary, popular prints.

Manet exploited pale grounds, often gray or creamy off-white, for their luminosity and flatness. It is more difficult to create an illusion of depth on a pale ground than a dark one and he used this to advantage in creating a shallow pictorial space. On such a ground, thinly painted areas contrasted with the oil-rich colors in the central motif, drawing attention to the main subject and thus directing the viewer's eye to the more important areas of the painting.

A deliberate and sometimes hesitant artist,Manet sought to disguise his slowness behind an impression of immediacy. Monet said of Manet's Olympia: 'He had a laborious- careful method. He always wanted his paintings to have the air of being painted at a single sitting; but often . . . would scrapedown what he had executed during the day ... he kept only the lowest layer, which had great charm and finesse, on which he would begin improvising.'

During the 1860s, Manet used diluted, subdued colors for his underpainting. However, as a result of his contact with Monet, he began to use paler colors, closer to the local colors of his subjects. Observation of outdoor light made Manet abandon his tonal palette and, like the Impressionists, add white in order to brighten his colors.

Manet's early works exhibit the cool light and warm brown shadows of the studio. He was at that time preoccupied with reworking Old Masters' compositions and themes with modern subjects. His painting technique combined traditional and innovative elements. In spite of Manet's contact with Impressionism, he continued to bridge the gap between past and present, and the revolutionary aspects of his technique influenced his successors.

Manet's underpainting for this studio picture was done more or less according to the local colors of the subject but darker. Focus is concentrated on the central group of figures by the use of dense and opaque paint, as contrasted with the thinly painted or roughly worked areas of the background. The strong light coming from behind the artist exaggerates contrasts of light and shade and suppresses half-tone modelling. The rich oil paint rarely exploits the smooth texture of the canvas but flows with it.
The green of the grass is worked up around the finished figures, and the brushwork follows their contours rather than being descriptive of the grass it represents.

In this smaller early version of Dejeuner sur l'herbe, Manet's unfettered experiments with contrasts and the elimination of half-tones in the modelling are even more uncompromising than in the finished exhibition picture. The main composition is roughly blocked in, the white ground glowing through the mainly fluid transparent colors.

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