page_title: Luncheon in the Studio
section_title: Early reception
hierarchical_section_title: Luncheon in the Studio / Early reception
context_page_description: Luncheon in the Studio is an 1868 oil painting by Édouard Manet. Partially a portrait of 16-year-old Léon Leenhoff — the son of Suzanne Leenhoff before her 1863 marriage to Manet, and possibly the son of Manet or Manet's father Auguste — it is also an enigmatic work that has received limited attention within Manet's oeuvre. Critic Nan Stalnaker notes that "despite continued questions about its meaning, the work is acknowledged to be brilliantly painted and a major Manet work".
context_section_description: The painting was exhibited in the 1869 Paris Salon along with Manet's The Balcony, another work that lacked a simple genre affiliation, and in which at least one of the figures seems to confront the viewer as if challenging the "fourth wall". Both pieces were found wanting by art critics of the day; by this time a common criticism of Manet was that his goal was to "attract attention at any price". The reviewer Jules-Antoine Castagnary criticized the two paintings in a quote that well reflects the conventional expectations of a painting in this period, just before the further turbulence that Impressionism brought upon art:
   What's the source of [Manet's] sterility? It's that while basing his art on nature, he neglects to make its aim the interpretation of life. He borrows his subjects from poets or takes them from his imagination; he isn't concerned to discover them in living usages. Whence, in his positions, much of their arbitrariness. In the Luncheon, for example, I see on a table where coffee is served a half-peeled lemon and fresh oysters, but these objects don't go together. Why have they been put there then? I know very well why. Because Manet has to the highest extent a feeling for colored patches, because he excels in representing that which is inanimate, and feeling superior in his still lifes, he is naturally inclined to paint them whenever possible... And just as Manet brings together, solely for the pleasure of striking the eyes, still-life elements that belong apart, he also distributes his personages haphazardly, without anything necessary and forced in their composition. Whence the uncertainty and often the obscurity of his thought. What is the young man doing in the Luncheon, seated in the foreground and seeming to look out at the public? True, he is well painted, brushed by a vigorous hand; but where is he? In the dining room? In that case, having his back to the table, he has the wall between him and us, and his position no longer makes any sense... [A] feeling for functions, for appropriateness, is indispensable... Like the personages in a play, it's necessary that every figure in a painting is in its proper plane, fulfills its role, and thereby contributes to the expression of the general idea. Nothing arbitrary and nothing superfluous, that is the law of all artistic composition.
  Another critic, Marius Chaumelin, echoed this sentiment (speaking of both paintings): "The personages... are not at all handsome [except for the seated woman in The Balcony, Berthe Morisot], their faces having something morose and disagreeable about them, like the faces of persons who pose, and in fact all these figures have the air of saying to us: Look at me!... Thus, no expression, no feeling, no composition." He spoke of "types without character, scenes devoid of all interest" and said disparagingly (yet insightfully from the point of view of modern criticism) that "Manet had made the portrait of a Balcony and a Luncheon".
caption: Manet's The Balcony and Luncheon in the Studio were exhibited in the same year. Both were criticized. Leenhoff also appears in this painting, in the dark background.
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