Manet finally gives in to this fascination in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), his first painting of Victorine in the nude. Her white body stands out starkly against the dark background, the womanly curves of her breast and thigh finally revealed. Stripped of disguises, Victorine’s body is here unequivocally a sexual object. With her anarchic sexuality revealed, Manet’s private conflict suddenly became a public uproar; the Emperor Napoleon III himself condemned the painting (hung in the Salon des Réfuses) as “indecent.” 
(Siebert 124). This controversy, powered by Victorine’s body, made Manet’s reputation as the leading young avant-garde artist of his time. Yet he was bewildered by the uproar, believing his painting to be misunderstood: he did not see it as “indecent,” it seems, at all. Perhaps this is because to Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe was a last-ditch attempt at restraint. Victorine’s bent arm and leg restrict our view of her torso and breast to a tiny triangle, a controlling frame like that of Portrait of Victorine Meurent; her body is turned away from us, mitigating our conflict with it. Manet still attempts to control and restrain the nude Victorine; the public uproar she created signaled his ultimate failure.
Detail: Manet, Edouard. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.