AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

The Courtauld Gallery’s version of Edouard Manet’s iconic painting Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is perplexing. It has long been thought to be a copy created after the iconic large-scale French masterpiece of the same title; a work described as a founding moment of modern art by the last great old master. The Courtauld’s smaller work, painted “in a curiously harsh and hasty style” (Wilson-Bareau, 1986), and the large Musee d’Orsay canvas has long been a subject of scholarly debate. The Courtauld canvas has indeed been considered to be a preparatory sketch, a later replica of the d’Orsay version, or even a copy by a later hand



This Courtauld “sketch” was purported to have been commissioned by a close friend of Manet, Commandant Hippolyte Lejosne. However, according to the Gallery archival records the Courtauld painting was understood to be a gift from the artist to his friend.  Following the Commandant’s death, the Lejosne family (of Maison-Lafitte) approached the Galerie Duret, one of Manet’s key dealers in Paris, who took the work on commission. In June 1928, the small sketch was brought to the attention of Samuel Courtauld by his principal art advisor and top London art dealer, Percy Moore Turner. Mr. Courtauld purchased the painting, and later, in 1932, bequeathed it to the newly formed Courtauld Gallery



Although signed by Manet in the lower left, scholarly debate has also extended beyond the painting function and onto questions over attribution. Much has been written about the narrative and symbolic meaning behind the making Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe but the ambiguous status of the Courtauld work is in no small part due to the fact that the painting had not the focus of a materials investigation, nor had it been painting treated in the Courtauld Conservation studio for over four decades. Now, after an in-depth material investigation and the full conservation treatment this paper endeavours to explore the relationship of the Courtuald’s painting to the largescale signature work housed in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay.

This paper is a typical collaborative story between art history, science and conservation. Working closely with the curator, the conservator and the conservation scientist considered the painting materials and artistic working practice in an attempt to shed new light on the meaning behind the making of Courtauld’s version of Manet’s iconic work. Using new techniques, such as macro-XRF scanning and steadfast archival research methods, it hopes to propose a possible chronology by looking at the notions of the artist’s sketches, working as well as later copies and finally look at the possibility of replicating by another hand.