![Édouard Manet - The Croquet Game [1873]](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5780/22487662374_a473206408_o.jpg)
With its sketchy manner of execution, the Game of Croquet is one of the few paintings by Manet to come this close to the Impressionist style. It depicts a popular, carefree pastime, croquet, and an evidently happy moment although it is by no means as spontaneous a snapshot as the mood perhaps suggests. On the contrary, the figures were carefully composed and incorporated into the surrounding space. Every one of them can be identified: they are the artist’s painter colleague Alfred Stevens, his friend Paul Roudier, and the models Alice Lecouvé and Victorine Meurent. The latter was already known to the art world as Manet’s Olympia au naturel and as the nude in his scandal-causing Déjeuner sur l’herbe. In the Game of Croquet, however, she adheres to the bourgeois fashion of the tightly laced corset and multi-layered skirt – while the men make an emphatically casual impression during the game.
[Städel, Frankfurt - Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 106 cm]