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The meaning of Luncheon in the Studio
by Edouard Manet (1832–1883)

 

The influence of William Hogarth (1697–1764)

 

 

 

 

Robin Simon

 

 

Three of Edouard Manet’s greatest paintings – A bar at the Folies Bergères (Courtauld Gallery, London), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; study for it, Courtauld Gallery, London), and Luncheon in the Studio (Pl 1) – are all still waiting in one respect or another for an explanation. What on earth is going on with those illogical reflections in A bar at the Folies Bergères? Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe remains a riddle, even if laden with pictorial reflections of Old Masters.

 

 

1 Luncheon in the Studio by Edouard Manet (1832–1883), 1868 (exhibited 1869).
Oil on canvas, 118 x 153.9 cm. Neue Pinakothek, Munich

 

 

Of them all, the least satisfactory explanations, it seems to me, have surrounded Luncheon in the Studio, first exhibited in 1869 simply as Déjeuner and painted in the summer of the year before, 1868. It was begun in a rented house in Boulogne, where Manet arrived in late July or early August, and then finished in Paris from September onwards.

We presume that the scene is set in a restaurant or in the dining-room of an hotel (perhaps the Hôtel Folkestone from which Manet painted a few views that summer), which would not, of course, have had a purpose-built studio, although a room could readily have been used as one. Indeed, the current title is misleading: the addition to the original title (Déjeuner) of ‘in the studio’ is a scholarly convenience to distinguish the picture from the earlier Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–3).

Michael Fried’s is by far the most extensive account of ‘Manet’s Sources’, the identification of the artist’s visual references to, or adoption of the manner of, Old Masters, a subject that indeed Fried pioneered and which, as he recounts, met with vigorous opposition. He revisited this topic, which he first published as an article in Artforum in 1969, in great detail in 1996 (chapter, ‘Manet’s Sources’) and critiqued it himself in the revised edition of that book in 1998 (chapter, ‘“Manet’s Sources” Reconsidered’) and, as a result, this fundamental element in Manet’s art has been established as incontrovertible. Fried asserts, surely rightly, that Manet’s purpose in deploying this context was to create a ‘connectedness with the entire history of European painting before his time’.[1] But Manet was doing more than that in Luncheon in the Studio and, I would suggest, in some of his other paintings as well.

I wonder whether something straightforward has been missing from the many complicated discussions of Luncheon in the Studio: not only Michael Fried’s but also those of such as Theodore Reff, whose critique of Fried’s initial publication of ‘Monet’s Sources’ is especially acute. No writer about Manet’s sources, so far as I can tell (and I am open to correction), mentions the major European artist whose very art was founded upon visual cross-references: William Hogarth (1697–1764).

In the present context of Luncheon in the Studio, the key point is that Hogarth’s art was cross-referential in the service of creating a narrative. Through the many props and other visual clues in the individual scenes of Hogarth’s series (A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and so on) we become aware not only of what is happening in any one scene but also of the action that has preceded it and what is likely to follow.

Any understanding of such an approach on the part of Manet has been missing from the many discussions of Luncheon in the Studio. I propose that Manet was offering the viewer a narrative – and one constructed very much in the manner of Hogarth,[2] although Fried stated as recently as 2020 that the details in the composition ‘suggest no discernible narrative’.[3]

As a matter of fact, Manet’s Olympia (1863, exhibited 1865, Pl 2), is now usually seen as a kind of narrative, with ‘before’, ‘now’, and ‘after’ all suggested – for which Manet provides clues.

 

 

2 Olympia by Edouard Manet, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 191 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 

 

First, there is the direct echo of a renaissance masterpiece of a nude, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a composition upon which Manet is playing variations. Then we see the cat with erect tail, the flowers, the slippers, the maidservant (and isn’t there a nod there to Pl 3 of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress?). The cat is a pun upon the French slang for female genitalia, ‘chatte’, a visual/verbal pun that is very like one of the most distinctive features of Hogarth’s art.

Another fundamental habit of Hogarth was to exploit a powerful reflection of an Old Master composition, as Manet does in Olympia, whether a painting or sculpture.[4] The dying harlot in Scene 5 of A Harlot’s Progress, for example, echoes Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa which itself notoriously plays upon the imagery of orgasm; and in this scene Hogarth was also deliberately calling to mind in his viewers the age-old English slang term for orgasm, ‘to die’. The repentant wife in the final scene of Marriage A-la-Mode is cast as the Magdalen at the foot of the Cross, as her murdered husband assumes the pose of a dying Christ with wounded side. Further connotations that Hogarth brings into play are that the Magdalen was traditionally held to have been a repentant prostitute while the then current pronunciation of her name was ‘maudlin’, suggesting that her tears and hand-wringing are not a reflection of any profound feeling. Sir Francis Dashwood at his devotions parodies a St Francis at his devotions, while at the same time playing upon the then current slang for having sex, ‘to be at one’s devotions’. Hogarth’s portrait of Joseph Porter shows his sitter in the pose of Raphael’s Tommaso Inghirami, adjusted so as to set up a little narrative between the two compositions, triggered by the difference between the moment shown in the original and that in Hogarth’s modern homage.[5] And so on.

Having said this, Manet is perhaps not always so accurate as Hogarth in his deployment of cross-references (something of which Fried seems uneasily aware in his identification of apparent reflections of past masters in Manet’s paintings). For example, I don’t believe it has been pointed out that the barmaid in Bar at the Folies Bergères assumes the pose of a Flemish or Italian renaissance Man of Sorrows.[6] But I remain baffled as to why. Hogarth, in contrast, invariably controls the connotations of the denotative image with precision and often in several ways, including a play upon words as well as images, as suggested above.[7] In cases such as Bar at the Folies Bergères – and Déjeuner sur l’herbe seems to function in much the same slightly unfocused way – Manet may indeed simply be intending, as Fried suggests, to use such visual references in order to place his art quite generally within the context of preceding painting in Europe.

In Luncheon in the Studio, however, the narrative seems clear, at least to someone used to looking at Hogarth. The boy has surely been posing in the studio (which we don’t see, for this is a dining-room, not a studio) with the military equipment that is now seen at his right. He has changed into his (very smart) everyday clothes for lunch: the arms and armour are studio props that have recently been in use and have been put down on the nearest chair. The cat cleaning itself, in a very Hogarthian ploy, helps to indicate how much time has passed, since the cat has made itself very much at home, perched beside the props. It is cleaning itself, as it, too, has eaten. And we might note that the black of the cat and that of the boy’s jacket deliberately draws attention to the armour.

In a manner again characteristic of Hogarth, we are offered further information about the passage of time. If the arms and armour and the cat take us back to a period before the scene now in front of us, the lighting-up of a cigar and the arrival of coffee indicate that lunch has been eaten. Hence, by the way, Manet’s own title for this picture, Après le café – ‘after coffee’ (it has already been served, more is arriving) – which is in itself an interesting title, since it clearly implies a sequence of events. Hence also the fruit and other detritus for which so many unsatisfactory symbolic explanations have been offered. Léon Leenhoff, the young man in the foreground, has had lunch too, and is about to leave – and the boater, flannels and lightweight jacket suggests that it is spring or summer – while the woman in the background appears to be regarding him almost as if checking his appearance.

Armour and boy are juxtaposed, the specific point being that he has exchanged an old helmet for a modern boater. The apparent collision of past and present embodied in the difference between the historical props and the boy’s fashionable clothing can only to be explained as deliberately suggestive of a narrative. Moreover, the armour offers further information, because it tells us exactly what kind of painting is being undertaken in the studio: obviously, a history painting is in the process of being created. This was precisely the kind of picture preferred by the Salon to which, with its sponsor, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Manet desired admission – even while feeling unable to compromise on his own approach, which was aimed at undermining, throughout his life, the retardataire prejudices of those institutions.

Luncheon in the Studio, then, suggests an insight into how art hovers between past and present, but especially when a modern artist might be in the process of creating, in a rented house in Boulogne in 1868, the illusion of an historical scene set in the more distant past. All of this is made apparent by Manet through the presentation of a composition that is emphatically modern in every respect – apart, that is, from the arms and armour. For most commentators, the most mysterious part of the painting is this very pile of armour and swords at the left: but it is the key to the whole composition.

This painting has kept its secret (Manet, notoriously, would refuse to explain his paintings), it would seem, ever since Jules Castagnary so heavily criticized Manet for piling on details that had no purpose – when, of course, they did:

 

En regardant ce Déjeuner… je vois, sur une table ou le café est servi, un citron à moitié pelé et des huitres fraiches; ces objets be marchent guère ensemble. Pourquoi les avoir mis?… C’est parce que M. Manet a au plus haut point le sentiment de la tache colorante, qu’il excelle àå reproduire ce qui est inanimé, et que, se sentant supérieure dans les natures mortes, il se trouve naturellement porté à en faire le plus possible… De même, que M. Manet assemble, pour le seul plaisir de frapper les yeux, des natures mortes qui devrait s’exclure; de même, il distribute ses personnages au hazard, sans que rien de nécessaire et de forcé ne commande leur composition. De là l’incertitude, et souvent l’obscruité dans la pensée. Que fait ce jeune homme du, qui est assis au permier plan et qui semble regarder le public? … ou est-il? Dans la salle à manger? Alors, ayant le dos à la table, il a la mur entre lui et nous, et sa position n’explique plus… il faut que dans un tableau chaque figure soit à son plan, remplisse son rôle et concoure ainsi à l’expression de l’idée Générale.[8]

 

Castagnary concluded with an instruction which, it seems to me, Manet actually followed to the letter: ‘Rien d’arbitraire et rien de superflu, telle est la loi de toute composition artistique.’[9]

How might Manet have known about Hogarth? Very easily indeed. In the 1860s Hogarth was much admired and discussed within Manet’s immediate circle. We should also consider the fact that, immediately before meeting Manet, and at the time when he did so, Edgar Degas was making sketches after Hogarth’s engravings, between the years 1859 and 1862.[10]

One of Manet’s own early champions was Théophile Gautier who though highly of Hogarth and first wrote about his art in 1855 and then in 1862 – a time when he and Manet were especially close,[11] which is immediately before Manet painted his (to me, Hogarthian) Olympia. Gautier wrote about Hogarth again, another rather striking coincidence of dates, in L’Artiste for August 1868, the very summer when Manet began work on Luncheon in the Studio – which he completed on his return to Paris in September (he had arrived in Boulogne in July). This is what Gautier wrote:

 

Tout, dans ses [Hogarth’s] tableaux, est significatif, observée, voulu. Le moindre detail a sa portée. Le pendule, la chaise, la table, sont celles qui doivent être là et point ailleurs, et il serait impossible d’en meuble une autre chambre.[12]

 

This sounds like Charles Lamb’s account of Hogarth, a writer Gautier knew well, and indeed echoes of Lamb’s writing have been detected elsewhere in Gautier’s work. Lamb referred to:

 

… the dumb rhetoric of the scenery, – for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth are living and significant things; the witticisms that are expressed by words (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they have endeavoured to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced words into their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered about; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, as is made visible to the ‘eye of mind’.[13]

 

Gautier appears in Manet’s Music in the Tuileries of 1862 (National Gallery, London) and so do two other vocal admirers of Hogarth. One of them was Charles Baudelaire, whom Manet shows in conversation with Gautier. Baudelaire wrote:

 

Le talent de Hogarth comporte en soi quelque chose de froid, d’astringent, de funèbre. Cela serre le coeur. Brutal et violent, mais toujours préoccupé du sens moral de ses compositions, moraliste avant tout, il les charge, comme notre Grandville, de détails allégoriques et allusionnels, dont la fonction, selon lui, est de compléter et d’élucider sa pensée.[14]

 

The third Hogarth admirer in Manet’s Tuileries is Jules Champfleury, who stands just behind Manet at the far left of the composition. Champfleury viewed Hogarth as a serious artist who truthfully depicted life in Britain at the time. He wrote, for example:

 

Le premier roi [de la caricature] fut un anglais, homme puissament organisé, peintre et moraliste, Hogarth, le veritable père de la caricature… Cet homme de génie, dont les compositions compliqués appartiennent autant à la literature qu’à la peinture, ne trouva de successeur ni en Angleleterre ni en France (p ix).[15]

 

Yet another member of Manet’s circle, Hippolyte Taine, was also an admirer of Hogarth, and wrote about him extensively in 1863.[16] The publication date is again interesting as it falls in the period when Manet was conceiving Olympia:

 

Mais Hogarth, qu’est-ce qu’il voulu? qui a jamais vu un pareil peintre? Est-ce un peintre? Les autres donnent envie de voir ce qu’il veut représenter.

 

Taine then describes particular scenes in great detail, calls Hogarth the ‘national painter’ of the English (p345), and quotes (p349) from The Analysis of Beauty. Like Baudelaire and Gautier, he dwells at length on the gruesome final scene of The Reward of Cruelty (pp350–1), which clearly fascinated them all.

 

 

 

 

 

I am most grateful to Christopher Riopelle for his encouragement.

  1. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, revd edn, Chicago 1998, p4. ↑
  2. I first suggested this in my Hogarth, France and British Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2017, ch 16, esp pp277–276. ↑
  3. Michael Fried, ‘Facingness meets mindedness: Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony’, Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol 73/74 (Spring/Autumn 2020), p193. ↑
  4. Robin Simon, ‘Hogarth’s borrowings’, chapter, Paul Williamson, ed, The Art of Borrowing, Stockholm 2016, pp40–63. See also my Hogarth, France and British Art, passim, and ‘Hogarth and Raphael, Joseph Porter and Daniel Lock: Johnsonian connections’, The British Art Journal, IV, 1 (2003), pp8–82. ↑
  5. For all these, see Simon, ‘Hogarth’s boorrowings’. ↑
  6. I mention this in Hogarth, France and British Art, p277. It is even possible that Manet was thinking of the pose of Christ in Leonardo’s Last Supper (Milan). – or Watteau’s Gilles… ↑
  7. Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason, 1947. I note in passing that it appears to me that Roland Barthes, in Rhetoric of the Image (1964), simply transferred Winters’s earlier and quite brilliant analysis of how poetry functions to images. I find it difficult to believe that Barthes was unaware of Winters’s work, but perhaps a reader can enlighten me further. ↑
  8. J.-A. Castagnary, ‘Salon de 1869,’ in Salons, 2 vols, Paris 1892, I, pp364–65. It first appeared in Le Siècle, 11 June 1869. ↑
  9. Castagnary then seems to echo Hogarth’s famous dictum, ‘My picture is my stage and men and women my players’: ‘Comme les personnages dans une comédie, il faut que dans un tableau chaque figure soit à son plan, remplisse son rôle et concoure ainsi à l’expression de l’idée générale.’ But this was, as Hogarth was well aware, a guiding principle of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture and it remained an academic axiom: see an extensive account of this to-fro relationship between stage and canvas in my Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick: Plays, Painting and Performance, London 2023. It is as though Castagnary ‘couldn’t see for looking’ when it came to Luncheon in the Studio. ↑
  10. I drew attention to these drawings in Hogarth, France and British Art, p277. Theodore, Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas: A Catalogue of the Thirty-Eight Notebooks, 2 vols, Oxford 1976, Carnet 15. See also Jean Sutherland Boggs, ‘Degas Notebooks at the Bibliothèque Nationale II: Group B (1858–1861)’, Burlington Magazine, C (June 1958), pp196–205 at p205 and n92. Degas’ Carnet 15 can be studied here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8438692p.r=Carnets%20Edgar%20Degas?rk=107296;4 ↑
  11. Gautier went to London in 1862 to review the London International Exhibition for the Gazette nationale our le Moniteur universel, 4 May–11 June, writing about Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence. ↑
  12. Reprinted in Théophile Gautier, Guide de L’Amateur au Musée du Louvre, Paris 1882, pp315–344, p326. ↑
  13. Charles Lamb, ‘On the Character and Genius of Hogarth’, The Reflector, II, no. 3 (1811), pp61–77, p75. ↑
  14. ‘Quelques caricaturistes étrangers’, Curiosités esthétiques in Oeuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire, edn Paris 1923, pp431–3. He first published this account in 1859, the year in which Degas began to copy from Hogarth’s prints. ↑
  15. Jules Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature moderne, Paris 1857, p ix. See also p146. He wrote about him again in Histoire de la caricature antique, Paris 1865, grouping him with Breghel, Goya and Daumier (p106). ↑
  16. Hyppolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, Paris 1863, III, pp345–351. ↑

 

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