Eating together with family and friends is one of the great social events, and became a popular theme in nineteenth century painting. It was enthusiastically adopted by several of the leading Naturalist painters, as shown below.

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe from 1863 is one of the best-known if not infamous paintings of a social meal. Two couples are apparently disinterested in the token picnic of fruit and bread that has spilled out from its basket in the left foreground. As the two men talk, fully dressed, a conspicuously naked woman stares unnervingly at the viewer, and the other woman is washing herself in the river behind. This was rejected by the Salon of that year, ensuring its lasting fame and influence.

A far cry from Manet’s meal, Eugène Lepoittevin’s Picnic from 1866 captures a picnic’s distinctive combination of the planned and impromptu. This group has lugged crockery, soup and a folding stool for their simple meal sitting on the grass under some trees.

Renoir’s masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81) is set on the Île de Chatou under the awning of the Restaurant Fournaise. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This meal seems all but over, the wineglasses near-empty as the party turns from eating to conversation.

In summer, breakfast became a favourite meal in your own garden. Just a year before his untimely death in 1884, the Italian peri-Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis painted this startling Breakfast in the Garden, with its contrast between the detail of the glass soda syphon, covered bowl, glasses, and other reflective materials on the table, and its wonderfully sketchy garden background.

Laurits Andersen Ring was more pointed in his social message in A Boy and a Girl Eating Lunch, from 1884. Paupers’ children, they have a single bowl of broth between them, and there’s not even a hint of wine and fruit. The girl looks up in tears, hoping for a miracle to change their lives, and take them away from this bare wooden table and blackened walls.

Léon Frédéric’s Funeral Meal from 1886 shows a large group of mourners sitting outside in the summer sunshine to remember the deceased following their funeral. Their meal is simple if not frugal, and there are neither glasses of wine nor mugs of beer. This is the moment that grace, or perhaps a eulogy for the deceased, is being read.

Now almost forgotten is Émile Friant’s masterpiece The Meurthe Boating Party, also known as Reunion of the Meurthe Boating Party or The Oarsmen of the Meurthe, from 1887. This shows the artist’s watersporting friends eating lunch together on the river Meurthe in Nancy. This can be read as a broad message of well-being and conviviality: healthy, fit young men engaged in team sports; fraternity; and harmony across different classes within society. It was exhibited at the Salon in 1888, and as a result of its success was featured as a full page in the popular magazine Le Monde Illustré, bringing Friant instant fame.

That same year the 23-year-old Swedish painter Hanna Pauli made the meal table the centrepiece of her virtuoso painting of Breakfast-Time (1887). She uses it as a demonstration of her skills in depicting the reflective surfaces of silverware, porcelain and abundant glassware, but its table is now deserted.

The Belgian artist Émile Claus also painted The Picnic in 1887. It’s set in the French/Belgian countryside around the River Lys, in the area of Ypres, which was devastated during the First World War. The plain clothing worn indicates these are poor farmworkers rather than landowners.