Editing Salon des Refusés (section)

===''Le déjeuner sur l'herbe''===
{{main|Le déjeuner sur l'herbe}}
{{Infobox Artwork
| image_file=Edouard Manet - Luncheon on the Grass - Google Art Project.jpg
| title=''The Luncheon on the Grass''
| other_language_1=French
| other_title_1=Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
| artist=[[Édouard Manet]]
| year=1862–1863
| medium=[[Oil painting|Oil on canvas]]
| height_metric=208
| width_metric=265.5
| height_imperial=81.9
| width_imperial=104.5
| metric_unit=cm
| imperial_unit=in
| city=[[Paris]]
| museum=[[Musée d'Orsay]]
| italic title=no
}}
Rejected by the Salon jury of 1863, Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit ''[[Déjeuner sur l'herbe]]'' and two other paintings in the 1863 Salon des Refusés.<ref name="Boime 2007 676">{{cite book|last=Boime|first=Albert|title=Art in an Age of Civil Struggle|url=https://archive.org/details/artinageofcivils0000boim|url-access=registration|year=2007|publisher=The University of Chicago Press|location=Los Angeles|isbn=978-0-226-06328-7|pages=[https://archive.org/details/artinageofcivils0000boim/page/676 676]}}</ref> ''Déjeuner sur l'herbe'' depicts the juxtaposition of a [[female nude]] and a scantily dressed female bather in the background, on a picnic with two fully dressed men in a rural setting. The painting sparked public notoriety and stirred up controversy and has remained controversial, even to this day. There is a discussion of it, from this point of view, in [[Proust]]'s ''[[Remembrance of Things Past]]''.

One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution in the ''[[Bois de Boulogne]]'', a large park at the western outskirts of Paris, at the time. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting.<ref>Peter J. Gartner, ''Art and Architecture: Musee D'Orsay'', 2001, p. 180. {{ISBN|0-7607-2889-5}}.</ref>

[[Émile Zola]] comments about ''Déjeuner sur l'herbe'':

<blockquote>''The Luncheon on the Grass'' is the greatest work of Édouard Manet, one in which he realizes the dream of all painters: to place figures of natural grandeur in a landscape.  We know the power with which he vanquished this difficulty.  There are some leaves, some tree trunks, and, in the background, a river in which a chemise-wearing woman bathes; in the foreground, two young men are seated across from a second woman who has just exited the water and who dries her naked skin in the open air.  This nude woman has scandalized the public, who see only her in the canvas.  My God!  What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men!  That has never been seen.  And this belief is a gross error, for in the [[Louvre]] there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude.  But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized.  The crowd has kept itself moreover from judging ''The Luncheon on the Grass'' like a veritable work of art should be judged; they see in it only some people who are having a picnic, finishing bathing, and they believed that the artist had placed an obscene intent in the disposition of the subject, while the artist had simply sought to obtain vibrant oppositions and a straightforward audience.  Painters, especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not have this preoccupation with the subject which torments the crowd above all; the subject, for them, is merely a pretext to paint, while for the crowd, the subject alone exists.  Thus, assuredly, the nude woman of ''The Luncheon on the Grass'' is only there to furnish the artist the occasion to paint a bit of flesh.  That which must be seen in the painting is not a luncheon on the grass; it is the entire landscape, with its vigors and its finesses, with its foregrounds so large, so solid, and its backgrounds of a light delicateness; it is this firm modeled flesh under great spots of light, these tissues supple and strong, and particularly this delicious silhouette of a woman wearing a chemise who makes, in the background, an adorable dapple of white in the milieu of green leaves.  It is, in short, this vast ensemble, full of atmosphere, this corner of nature rendered with a simplicity so just, all of this admirable page in which an artist has placed all the particular and rare elements which are in him.<ref>Émile Zola, ''Édouard Manet,'' 1867,  et lps 91</ref></blockquote>

[[Émile Zola]] incorporated a fictionalized account of the 1863 scandal in his novel ''[[L'Œuvre]]'' ''(The Masterpiece)'' (1886).