Monet’s final Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, which survives only in fragmented form, confirms Monet’s primary interest in nature, not his figures, and indeed Monet’s inability to finish it may stem from his inability to work on it in nature, en plein air, as a result of its enormous size. His 20 by 13 foot canvas, an enlargement from his study of about three times, was to have been on scale with Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1850) yet this ambitious scope forced him to return to a studio in Paris, rather than staying in the woods, to finish it (Isaacson, 14). Working from sketches and his studies, he struggled to complete the canvas while fielding criticism from Courbet himself. Eventually Monet grew so dissatisfied that he abandoned the canvas, finally leaving it with a carpenter in Argenteuil as rent in 1878 (Isaacson, 17). 
When Monet returned six years later to buy the painting back, he found it had been left in a damp cellar and consequently was molding. At this point, he cut it up into the two large fragments which remain today. Ironically, the majority of what Monet cut out was the landscape section, showing that it was clearly more important to Monet, representing more than half the painting, as the Pushkin study shows. Moreover, despite the incomplete canvas, it is evident that the landscape was handled with more care than the figures, as the figures are even more cast into shadow than previously, with bits of grass being highlighted now in addition to the trees and the costumes mostly ignored: the yellow dress and the white dress on the right are clearly not finished, suggesting Monet was struggling to complete the figures when he decided to abandon the canvas. It was the figures that caused Monet’s problems, not the landscape.
Images: Monet, Claude. Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Left and Center Fragments), 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Scanned from: Wildenstein, Daniel. Monet: Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. 2. Köln, Germany: Taschen, 1994. 4 vols.