Jonathan Jones on artPaintingThe top 10 picnics in art
From scandalous scenes in the French countryside to Rubens' plea for the pleasures of peace, here are the finest al fresco dining paintings in history The top 10 ancient Greek artworks
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Édouard Manet – Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863)
This great painting introduces a theme the impressionists would love – the bourgeois picnic – but with a tough irony all its own. Manet deliberately evokes Renaissance paintings of sensual leisure – in particular the masterpiece below – but updates the idyll to show bohemian gents of his own class accompanied by women who may be prostitutes. It's a raw blast of reality disguised as a rustic fantasy. This picnic bites back.
Titian – The Pastoral Concert (c1509)
Titian's poem to rural escape is famous for being parodied by Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, yet is itself subversive. Titian portrays two affluent – and clothed – men enjoying the countryside with naked women who are probably courtesans. The painting reflects the louche lifestyle of Titian and his fellow artist Giorgione (to whom the painting was attributed when Manet travestied it). As for the picnic, it's basically a drink of water, but no painting more exquisitely celebrates summer fun in the country.
Henri Matisse – Luxe, calme et volupté (1904)
Pure pleasure and Mediterranean light are dappled in the hallucinatory colours of this hedonist masterpiece. There's a picnic, too. Matisse refers to images of pastoral bliss going back to the Renaissance in his depiction of food, drink, bodies, landscape, sea and drugged sky.
Rubens – Peace and War (1629-30)
A ripe country feast of fresh fruits proffered by a satyr symbolises the good life in this painting that was created as a political argument. On an official embassy to London to argue for peace with Spain, the diplomat and artist Rubens chose to make his point by painting a picture of the pleasures of peace – literally, its fruits – and all that war would ruin. Little more than a decade later, Britain would be torn by civil war, the picnic trampled underfoot.
Claude Monet – Luncheon on the Grass (1865-6)
For Manet, a picnic is a sly image of decadence and corruption. For Monet, it is untroubled bliss. This early masterpiece by the greatest impressionist – which survives only in fragments – reveals that impressionism is not only a style but an ethos. Consciously rejecting the stiff, moralising manners of their parents, these young people enjoy the open air, the sun, the moment. Monet has painted a hymn to happiness in the here and now.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Harvesters (1565)
Most images of picnics in art, from Titian to the plein air lunches of the impressionists, show leisured folk ... but this painting recognises the stolen pleasures of the rural poor. In a moment's rest from back-breaking toil, the harvesters are having a rustic meal that looks as desirable as any in art. Is Bruegel saying that work makes food and drink taste even better? Or simply that peasants are human beings with rights and needs? Whatever its meaning, this is a great document of people's history.
Nicolas Poussin – The Triumph of Pan (1636)
This picnic has got out of control. Grapes and wine need a bit of ballast – some sandwiches might have helped. The worshippers of Pan are going wild in the country as this goat-legged god releases the bestial in humanity. Poussin's painting echoes scenes of pastoral mayhem like Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians and ultimately Dionysian images on ancient Greek vases (he did his research), but compared with such hedonist antecedents Poussin introduces a stern moral tone that is – you guessed it – profoundly Christian.
Renoir – Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81)
Technically this is a restaurant meal rather than a picnic, but no collection of the art of al fresco pleasure would be complete without the untroubled sensuality of Renoir. Light and flesh fill his world, as men and women enjoy themselves on one of the river trips that were so central to the lifestyle painted and praised by the impressionists. Like an unfinished short story, this painting invites you to speculate on their relationships and wonder what happened next.
James Tissot – Holyday (c1876)
Tissot brought some of the freedom and modernity of impressionist art to staid Victorian England. In this terrific painting he portrays the openminded young at a moment when older values were starting to be challenged and morality was becoming less confident. After all, Darwin was proving our animal descent. This is a glimpse of the real lives of our ancestors, not as repressed as we tend to think.
Jan Steen – Two Men and a Young Woman Making Music on a Terrace (c1670-5)
A light lunch of fruit and wine has contributed to the relaxed manners of these young people as they dice with moral danger. Steen is an artist who mocks and warns in the same brushstroke. Is he a tolerant observer or a severe Christian judge? Either way, the music these pleasure-seekers are making on their Dutch picnic is leading to loose ways.
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