Two remarkable pictures of 1863 and 1865 show that Manet had grasped the problem and was endeavouring in a tentative way to give expression to his ideas.
In one of these, "The Picnic," painted in 1863, there was a stretch of sward, a few trees, and in the background a river in which a woman was merrily splashing in her chemise; in the foreground were seated two young men in frock-coats opposite another woman, who has just come out of the water and been drying herself. Needless to say, this picture was rejected as something unprecedented, by the committee, which included Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Robert Fleury, and Hippolyte Flandrin. Eugène Delacroix was the only one in its favour. So Manet was relegated to the _Salon des Refusés_, where Bracquemond, Legros, Whistler, and Harpignies were hung beside him. This Exhibition was held in the Industrial Hall, and the public went through a narrow little door from one gallery to the other. Half Paris was bewildered and discomposed by these works of the rejected; even Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie ostentatiously turned their backs upon Manet's picture when they visited the Salon. This naked woman made a scandal. How shocking! A woman without the slightest stitch of clothes between two gentlemen in their frock-coats! In the Louvre, indeed, there were about fifty Venetian paintings with much the same purport. Every manual of art refers to "The Family," as it is called, and the "Ages of Life" of Giorgione, in which nude and clothed figures are moving in a landscape and placed ingenuously beside each other. But that a painter should claim for a modern artist the right of painting for the joy of what is purely pictorial was a phenomenon that had never been encountered before. The public searched for something obscene, and they found it; but for Manet the whole picture was only a technical experiment: the nude woman in front was only there because the painter wanted to observe the play of the sun and the reflections of the foliage upon naked flesh; the woman in her chemise merely owed her existence to the circumstance of her charming outline making such a delightful patch of white amid the green meadows. Manet for the first time touched the problem which Madox Brown had thrown out in his "Work" ten years before in England, though for the present he did so with no greater success: the sunbeams glanced no doubt, but they were heavy and opaque; the sky was bright, but without atmosphere. As yet there is nothing of the Manet who belongs to history.