Today, her pale, slightly stocky body projects a kind of tact. Neither overly sexual nor distractingly homely, she has a frank dignity that is vastly preferable to the eroticism of so many Salon nudes. To Manet’s chagrin, most of his contemporaries did not see her that way. Even sympathetic critics lamented that “the nude hasn’t a good figure, unfortunately.”6 Their response echoes Delacroix’s disappointment over the “poorly built” and “oddly shaped” models in the Durieu calotypes, whose bodies did not match pre-photographic conventions. There are other reasons to associate this female figure with photography: the precision of her stare; the unerring articulation of her body in space; and most of all the harsh, nearly shadowless light that illuminates her from the front, almost as if we ourselves, the viewers, were shining a spotlight at her. This kind of lighting has distinctive effects: it simplifies and flattens foregrounds while leaving backgrounds dark. Almost unprecedented in painting, such stark frontal lighting had in fact first made its appearance just a few years earlier in certain portraits by the great photographer Nadar, a friend of both Manet and Delacroix.7

Does this mean that Manet may have staged photographs, and worked directly from them? It’s a contentious subject, one many scholars have dismissed with special irritation, as if the idea were both implausible and belittling.8 If he did work from his own Nadaresque photographs, however, Manet did not simply reproduce them. He invented a brusque new painterly facture, a distinctive stylization of a distinctive kind of photography. That combination, with its simplicity and brio, made his paintings look persuasively unphotographic, especially compared to the expectations of their time. But the buried presence of photography is something that we ourselves sense, at least intuitively, whenever we look at paintings like the Déjeuner and Olympia. It is not enough to say that there is something eerily contemporary about the presence of Manet’s model for these paintings, Victorine Meurent. Nakedness is always potentially timeless, but other nudes from the 1860s do not make these claims. What we recognize is a visual meme that we know from countless examples: the stark, flash-lit figure (actual flash lighting was not developed until after Manet’s death, but the effect of strong frontal lighting is equivalent). In Victorine, we recognize the distant ancestress of our own night snapshots, with their overexposed skin tones and narrow, contour-hugging shadows.

That recognition is puzzling, a quiet provocation lurking underneath the more blatant oddity of Victorine’s nakedness. What’s troubling is not her photographicity itself, but the way that it jars against the sketchy handling of her setting. Around Victorine (and her almost equally photographic male companions), crude tree trunks and foliage have been brushed in with a casual touch, creating distinctly thin, cartoony greenery. Since the Déjeuner was first displayed, this contrast—a “wholly inexplicable incoherence” between figures and setting—has irked viewers. But the contrast has never been seen in photographic terms, as subliminal multimedia friction: Nadaresque bodies set in a strongly unphotographic painterly glade. The Déjeuner, in other words, is a covert collage, an amalgam of photographic and traditional sources—including, no doubt, drawings, sketches, and, of course, Marcantonio’s engraving too. Of these sources, Marcantonio was the most public, the most likely to be recognized. For anyone in Delacroix’s circle, it might even have been a cue, a symbol of thinking about such frictions, a reminder of his 1853 experiment. Perhaps, having heard some version of the journal story, Manet set out to play with its premise, to see whether he could make the dissonance between Marcantonio and photography into more than just an experiment—into a picture.

To be sure, there are no surviving nude photographs of Victorine Meurent, no corroborating statements from Manet, nothing to prove the connection. Manet’s decision to use Marcantonio may be a coincidence.9 But it’s clear, at least, that Manet was thinking along lines very close to Delacroix’s. The idea of a Delacroixian Déjeuner might do more than provide a fresh angle on an overstudied picture; it might in fact illuminate the relatively furtive early symbiosis of photography and painting. What would this mean? In other words, what would it mean to see Manet as consciously responding to the anxieties Delacroix articulated? First, it might soften our attitude toward Manet’s public, the perplexed and often hostile Parisian audience of 1863. For these viewers, as for Delacroix and his guests ten years earlier, the look of photographic bodies was still novel and uncomfortable. Hence their irritation with the image of Victorine, which many found not just unfortunate, but even “the ideal of ugliness.”10 For other, presumably more photographically experienced spectators, Victorine was one of the few satisfying elements—one of the only passages, as the critic Théodore Pelloquet put it, “that come close to nature.”11 (It’s telling that the first group phrased its dissatisfaction in terms of an “ideal,” the second in terms of “nature.”) Manet’s audience, in other words, was a mixed group, caught in a transition that the Déjeuner itself reflected. Whereas academic painting smoothed and eased the photographic transition, the Déjeuner did the opposite. The painting’s incoherent facture mirrored a discomfort Manet’s peers felt in their everyday lives, as they squinted at portrait photographs or reproductions of works of art, finding that neither looked quite satisfying.

Our eyes are different. We read the cursory trees, the flat painterliness, the willfulness of the whole amalgam, as a kind of prelude to Cézanne’s forests, Matisse’s gardens, and Picasso’s beaches. For us, it’s easy, perhaps too easy, to see Manet’s Déjeuner as a step into the future. But for Manet himself, the Déjeuner was as much about the past as the future, a past that was being threatened, even “spoiled,” by the new photographic sensitivity. In his own lifetime, photography was making the unevenness of earlier art problematic. Marcantonio’s engravings were revealed to be full of errors and mannerisms; presumably so were even greater works, the masterpieces by Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, and Watteau that Manet quoted so frequently during the 1860s. Historians have long puzzled over this odd practice, Manet’s persistent quotation of earlier art. At the same time, viewers have been puzzled by Manet’s strange facture, his palpable errors and frank inconsistency. In light of Delacroix’s thought, it seems clear that these were two facets of the same intent: a desire to reaffirm painting’s unevenness, to defend variability. “The grandeur of the Old Masters,” as Delacroix put it, “does not consist in the absence of faults.” Delacroix’s point was already polemical, but it was Manet who put that polemic into pictorial form. Seduced and empowered by photography, academic finish threatened to banish human clumsiness, seemingly forever. Manet’s response was not kneejerk intransigence—which might have meant adopting a uniformly sketchy romantic manner. Instead, by toggling toward and away from photography, he made his own waywardness look unmistakably deliberate, and new.