Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (The Picnic, fragment)

The impact of Courbet on Monet has sometimes been overshadowed by his relations with Manet or his older relationship with Jongkind and Boudin on the Normandy coast, yet Monet’s admiration for the champion of Realism is clearly visible in the huge Picnic (4,6 by 6 meters) which was unfinished and later rolled up and then cut up. In one of the two large fragments preserved in the Mus�e d’Orsay it is possible to recognise, seated among the guests in a clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, the figure of Courbet himself. The overall composition (as preserved in the smaller version in Moscow) did not yet include Courbet, and we know that Bazille posed for four male figures.