With their respective Déjeuners sur l’herbe, Monet and Manet were participating in the long-standing Western genre tradition of picnic painting. These paintings depicted small groups gathered in the countryside, leisurely enjoying a meal and each other’s company.
In the sixteenth century, Italian masters such as Titian, Giorgione, and Raphael depicted
mythological scenes of bacchanals and gods feasting. While Manet acknowledged his debt to 
Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre (1508-09), it was unmistakably in Raphael’s Judgment of Paris (1510-20), known through Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving, that he found the inspiration for the positioning of the figures in his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Isaacson, 39). Giorgione’s Féte Champétre, however, is responsible for the precedent of depicting figures in contemporary clothing and the depiction of nude women alongside clothed men.
In the eighteenth century, Rococo artists, such as Jean-Antoine Watteau and Carle van Loo, 
favored the féte champétre as well. These artists updated the genre to apply to the aristocracy of their day, effectively “secularizing” the subject (Isaacson, 39). Both Watteau and van Loo had studied the Italian masters and painted similar scenes. Watteau’s Les Champs-Elysées
(1716-19) depicts a whimsical, intimate scene of aristocrats lounging in the countryside, while van Loo’s Une halte de chasse (1737) shows an aristocratic feast in the middle of a hunting trip. Van Loo’s painting is more active, with more people in the foreground surrounding the food spread out on a white cloth, similar to the composition of Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
By the mid-nineteenth century, picnics had become popular with the middle classes as
more and more Parisians took the train out to the countryside to escape the troubles of modern urban life (Isaacson, 37). One of the favorite escapes was the Fontainebleau forest, where Monet worked on his Déjeuner. Meanwhile, the depiction of the déjeuner sur l’herbe had taken on a literary, sentimental and picturesque air, becoming prevalent in the popular and commercial arts. Popular lithographs and engravings of the period, designed for gentlemen’s private view, often depicted picnickers in “permissive” settings (Tucker, 78). Therefore, Manet, by depicting a “permissive” scene on such a large scale, was judged as vulgar. English critic Philip Hamerton, in the Fine Arts Quarterly for October 1863, explained the difference between Giorgione’s painting and Manet’s Déjeuner:
“Giorgione had conceived the happy idea of a fête champêtre in which, although the gentlemen were dressed, the ladies were not, but the doubtful morality of the picture is pardoned for the sake of the fine colour… Now some wretched Frenchman has translated this into modern French realism, on a much larger scale, and with the horrible, modern French costume instead of the graceful Venetian one. Yes, …the prinicipal lady entirely undressed… another female in a chemise coming out of a little stream that runs hard by, and two Frenchmen in wide-awakes sitting on the very green grass with a stupid look of bliss. There are other pictures of the same class, which lead to the inference that the nude, whenever painted by vulgar men, is inevitably indecent.”
While Monet’s Déjeuner may not have made history in the same way Manet’s did, Monet certainly failed at disregarding it; he seems to have updated the eighteenth-century aristocratic idyll of a leisurely picnic in the countryside to a nineteenth-century middle-class version (Isaacson, 41), effectively following the tradition he was seeking to ignore.
Images: Titian. Fête Champêtre, 1508-09. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Raimondi, Marcantonio. The Judgment of Paris (after Raphael), 1510-20. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Watteau, Jean-Antoine. Les Champs Elysées, 1717. Wallace Collection, London.
van Loo, Carle. Une halte de chasse, 1737. Musée du Louvre, Paris.