The list of rejected artists is amazing. Like Herod’s soldiers, the jury seems to have been chiefly occupied in stamping out youth. Bracquemond, Cals, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J. P. Laurens, Legros, Manet, Pissarro, Vallon, Whistler, these and many others were thrown out. The work was too vigorously performed, and Napoleon III. authorised the opening of another gallery in the same building as the old Salon, known as the Salon des Refusés. The most striking canvas in this room was Manet’s first great work, the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Breakfast on the Grass), sometimes called Le Bain.
The painting challenged opposition on two separate grounds. The first was its subject; the second its technique. Between two young men stretched on the grass, wearing the black frock-coats of a latter-day civilisation, sits a nude woman drying her legs with a towel. In the background another woman “en chemise” is paddling in the stream. In defence of such a subject it is usual to refer to the painters of the Renaissance, who, without exciting angry comment, mixed draped and undraped figures in their compositions. There is a celebrated Giorgione at the Louvre to which none objected. Other times, other manners. Infanticide is not encouraged in England although it is the practice in China. Many social practices of the Renaissance, innocent enough in the eyes of that golden age, are distinctly discouraged by the criminal code of to-day. Forty years have elapsed since the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was first exhibited, and Mrs. Grundy is not the power she was. But if any English painter hung a representation of two dressmaker’s assistants bathing in the Serpentine under exactly the same conditions as Manet depicted the little party at Saint-Ouen, there would be some sharp criticism.
It is far more pleasing to discuss Manet’s manner of painting. In a period when work was sombre in tone and Nature rapidly losing her place in art, Manet with his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Olympia, and Le Fifre de la Garde, changed the current with startling directness.
PORTRAIT OF BERTHE MORISOT · EDOUARD MANET
In these and other canvases there was not a shadow, the surface being from end to end clear and highly coloured. Where a Classicalist would have rendered a shadow in the usual burnt umber, Manet made his tones a little less clear, but always coloured and always in value. His method of working was to discard all blacks and preparations of blacks. This was directly antagonistic to the teaching of Couture, who painted on a black canvas. Manet drew straight away on a white canvas with the end of his brush. Then, after having endeavoured to render with a single tone all the pale parts, he carried the lights right into the shadows, of which he studied the slightest nuance. The result was novel to the vision, and strange to the public. The Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was a masterly rendering of white flesh against black clothes, which was not appreciated because it was so foreign to the eye.
“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,”
is an excellent motto for painters who wish to achieve popular renown, but it was never the motto of Manet and the Impressionists.
To a certain extent the Salon des Refusés was successful. The jury of the old Salon had received a fright, and in 1865 they opened their doors very widely. Making a virtue of necessity, they reversed their policy and welcomed the whole artistic world, in order to obviate the necessity of a second Salon des Refusés.