The Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet

Scholars also cite two works as important precedents for Manet’s painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Pastoral Concert, 1508, by Giorgione or possibly Titian (in the Louvre) and Giorgione’s The Tempest, both of which are famous Renaissance paintings. The Tempest also features a fully dressed man and a nude woman in a rural setting, as an important precedent for Manet’s painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. The painting Pastoral Concert, even more closely resembles Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, featuring two dressed men seated in a rural setting, with two undressed women. Pastoral Concert, is in the collection of the Louvre in Paris making it more likely to have been studied by Manet.

Engraving after Raphael by Marcantonio Raimondi

Giorgione, The Tempest