Edouard Manet - A Game of Croquet Tile

A Game of Croquet (La Partie de croquet), painted by Édouard Manet in 1873 in oil on canvas, captures four friends enjoying the fashionable lawn game in a sunlit garden. Fellow painter Alfred Stevens sits casually in the foreground, Manet’s friend Paul Roudier appears farther back, and the models Victorine Meurent and Alice Lecouvé stand between them. Painted en plein air in natural light, the scene combines loose, rapid brushwork with the relaxed atmosphere of outdoor leisure, bringing Manet unusually close to the emerging Impressionists. Yet the apparent spontaneity is carefully constructed: the figures seem at first to form two respectable couples, although they are in fact the artists and their models, subtly undermining the bourgeois garden idyll.