Salon des Refusés
The outcry in the artistic community over the sidelining of new artists in favor of popular, established, traditional artists at the annual Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts leads to the creation of a Salon des Refusés for the rejected artists to display their work. No painting gathers more interest or generates more criticism than Claude's. Entitled "Plein Air" ("Open Air"), it depicts a nude female figure in the front center and two female nudes in the background, with a fully dressed man, back to the viewer in the foreground. (Zola deliberately invokes "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" by Édouard Manet, which provoked outcries at the actual Salon des Refusés in 1863.)