The curators of True to Nature: Open-Air Painting 1780–1870 eloquently close the introduction to their catalog by noting the “rhythmic and poetic juxtapositions on our walls.” ¹ Plein air, it would seem, not only belongs to the visual realm, but offers a conduit to the musicality expressed by lyric poetry. An oil painting on paper by Camille Corot (Fig. 1), which is featured in the exhibition, reverberates with the nineteenth-century poet and art critic Théophile Gautier’s tribute poem “A trois paysagistes” [To three landscape painters], which directly compares “un grand paysagiste” [a great landscape painter] to “un poëte inspiré” [an inspired poet], and revels in the atmospheric effects and multi-sensory experience produced by Corot’s Italianate sunset:

Fragrant vapor, as if from an incense burner,
Unfurls its smoke in the distance,
And the sky is so clear, so crystalline, so pure,
That one can make out the infinite behind the blue. ²

The shimmering effects, changing colors, and even scents of the landscape not only captivate the senses, but also echo the “tranquil” lyric notes of Virgil. ³

This essay considers open-air painting’s influence on nineteenth-century French lyric poetry by tracing the juxtapositions that occur between Stéphane Mallarmé’s evocation of plein air in his monumental lyric poem “L’Après-Midi d’un faune: Éclogue” [Afternoon of a Faun: Eclogue] (1876) and Édouard Manet’s marked emphasis on air and the outdoors in his paintings of the early 1870s. ⁴ Mallarmé’s insistence on atmosphere, underscored by his famous poem’s mise en scène of a balmy afternoon and its vibrant mesh of natural elements, suggests that the piece is meant to be experienced as a plein air poem, one that, despite its apparent escape into a classical pastoral mode, draws freely from the modern naturalistic impulses of Impressionist painting. Manet’s increasing emphasis on outdoor painting prompts Mallarmé to evoke what the poet Yves Bonnefoy calls an “agitation of words,” a movement inspired by how both the artist’s and the viewer’s gaze constantly shift and thus constantly alter their perspectives of the material world or of the work of art. Visual representations are never framed or static, and neither are poems:

[W]ords grazed, one moment, just like one thing perceived by the eyes near the other, words sent away but also kept, left in suspense in memory, words co-present in the “absolute present of things”… Mallarméan words will have to be this setting into relation that is no longer logical but spatial: figures on a fan that the lyric brusquely sends into a refreshing and rejuvenating flutter.⁵

Only through the sensation of air that circulates within the faun’s landscape, and the myriad sensations produced by the natural world around him, do we arrive at the fresh “flutter” of musical air emitted by his pipes.

Manet and Mallarmé first met in Paris in 1873, at the cusp of the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. Hardly any evidence of correspondence between the two exists, since Mallarmé made frequent if not daily visits to Manet’s studio until the painter’s untimely death in 1883.⁶ On the surface, the close friendship appears surprising. Manet, a debonair and well-to-do man of the world who prowled his native Paris for inspiration (Fig. 2), had brazenly upended Salon norms with controversial and highly publicized paintings such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe [The Luncheon on the Grass] (1863) (Fig. 3). In sharp contrast, Mallarmé was a high school teacher who lived a quiet, provincial life with his small family. While he steadily accrued many acquaintances and friends within literary circles, mostly through correspondence, his intense pursuit of capturing the “idea” in his poetry led to painstakingly crafted poems that were often left unfinished. His eventual decision to move to Paris in 1871, to bolster his career as a poet, resulted from an abatement of a spiritual crisis that led him to understand poetry as a realizable art rather than an abstract myth.⁷

Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, Manet and Mallarmé shared a fierce dedication to pursuing ideas through intellectual prowess and intense experimentation, and were fully committed to producing works that were free from the pressures of public taste or academic dictates. Stressing the artist’s engaged and thus creative mind, as well as painting’s affinity to music, Manet noted: “I have only one ambition: not to stay equal to myself, not to do the same thing day after day. I want to keep on seeing things from new angles. I want to try and make people hear a new note.”⁸ Similarly, Mallarmé’s essays on Manet embrace the liberating energy of artistic creativity and can be read as manifestos against Salon juries: “The reproach with which superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognise the fact that he paints the truth.”⁹ This mutual respect and sense of artistic independence led to a few collaborative enterprises, including an illustrated deluxe edition of “Afternoon of a Faun,” published in 1876. Manet’s famous portrait of Mallarmé, which was painted the same year, reflects not only the intimate connection between painter and poet, but an emphasis on thought and contemplation whose workings seem to be expressed through the cigar smoke unfurling from the poet’s hand as it gingerly sits atop an open book (Fig. 4). Though focused on an interior as well as an introspective mood, the portrait suggests air and atmosphere through the movement of smoke, the play of light and shadows, and rapid (even ethereal) brushstrokes.

Indeed, the suggestion of air and the subtle movements it evokes would inform the bulk of Mallarmé’s writings on Manet. In Mallarmé’s 1876 essay “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet,” air above all represents the power of suggestion in how it reflects the painter’s aim “to impress upon his work a natural and a general law, to seek out a type rather than a personality, and to flood it with light and air: and such air! air which despotically dominates over all else.”¹⁰ For Mallarmé, Manet’s Le Linge [Laundry] (Fig. 5) represents above all this paradoxical despotism of “light and air,” and in fact “marks a date in a lifetime perhaps, but certainly one in the history of art.”¹¹ Though seemingly mundane, Laundry captures “the search after truth”¹² in Manet’s evocation of air as a unifying current that leads all elements of the painting to work off of each other. Air allows the artist to capture nature as both a vibrant and obfuscating network of infinite phenomena, and the viewer sees all of these processes merge together:

It is deluged with air. Everywhere the luminous and transparent atmosphere struggles with the figures, the dresses, and the foliage, and seems to take to itself some of their substance and solidity; whilst their contours, consumed by the hidden sun and wasted by space, tremble, melt, and evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere, which plunders reality from the figures, yet seems to do so in order to preserve their truthful aspect. Air reigns supreme and real, … with its perpetual metamorphosis and its invisible action rendered visible.¹³

The Impressionist painting’s “truth” is the countless perspectives that it offers, thereby creating potential for the imagination through a sense of instability that loosens the artist from restraint. Working with an atmospheric “medium of air,”¹⁴ Manet “seems to ignore all that has been done in art by others, and draws from his own inner consciousness all his effects of simplification, the whole revealed by effects of light incontestably novel.”¹⁵

The heroic question that Manet faced, as would Mallarmé with “Afternoon of a Faun” as he transformed the traditional classical eclogue (a pastoral poem predominantly associated with Virgil) into an airy impressionistic melody later made famous by Claude Debussy, was how to evoke naturalistic sensibilities and modern subjects without compromising his keen sense of working both within and against the grain of storied artistic traditions. At the start of his friendship with Mallarmé, Manet had evolved out of his controversial avant-garde history paintings of the 1860s towards the aesthetic potential of plein air with modern subjects.¹⁶ Echoes of Manet’s signature dissonance between iconic genres and modern life (the timeless nude and the pastoral merged with clearly contemporary subjects in Luncheon on the Grass, for example) are accentuated in Sur la plage [On the beach] (Fig. 6) as the elegant fashion and poses of his sitters are brought to the foreground against a marine landscape. Painted when Manet was working primarily in plein air during a stay at the Normandy coast in Berck-sur-Mer, the bold swaths of sky, foamy water, and windswept beach as well as the grains of sand caught in the canvas’s paint underscore the artist’s absorption in the natural scene.¹⁷ The painting reinforces Mallarmé’s observation that air in a Manet painting is not merely suggested, but plays the role of a “medium.”

More than a mimetic enterprise meant to capture the sense of naturalistic sensations within landscapes, Manet’s suggestion of air is a marker of how the artist approaches traditional genre scenes and presents “a new angle.” While the natural scenery in Luncheon on the Grass (Fig. 3) appears as a theater backdrop, Manet’s Impressionistic enterprises in the early 1870s lend a sense of movement, not only to the natural elements depicted, but to the subtle ways in which the artist is approaching the traditional genre of landscape. If during his Normandy interlude Manet veered as closely as he ever would towards the plein-air aesthetic embraced by Claude Monet,¹⁸ his Une partie de croquet [A Game of Croquet] of 1873 (Fig. 7) nevertheless eschews “the comfortable genre scene in favor of this psychic distance that Manet suggests between the characters, the viewer himself being part of this game.”¹⁹ Though indisputably Impressionistic, the painting’s suggestion of air and atmosphere is in direct tension with its figures, who appear sculptural and even collage-like. Aside from the naturalistic setting, everything appears as a prop, a dissonance which is reinforced by the drab gray watering can placed right at the center of the tableau. Featuring artists and their models enjoying a fashionable pastime instead of the typical “innocent” portrayal of husbands and wives partaking in an outing,²⁰ Manet’s subtle yet cheeky subversion of social mores as well as of pastoral tradition, more so than the lush portrayal of vegetation and interplay of light and shadow, serves as the current of air that lends this scene its originality and allure.

Les Hirondelles [The Swallows] (Fig. 8) perhaps above all heightens the tension between a “naturalistic current” and “the traditions of painting.”²¹ Also painted in Berck in 1873, The Swallows, a tableau that quickly darts and hovers passerine-like between tradition and avant-garde, presents a Dutch landscape painting infused with a modern aesthetic:

[T]he land and the sky in The Swallows have so much incident that we almost ignore the fact that they constitute two rectangles. The windmills, facing the sea off to the left and behind us, are a convenient reminder of the northern tradition that underpins this composition. … The Swallows has a broad sweep of flat land, a village in mid-distance, and an active sky which were staples of Dutch prints and paintings. … Berck was not far from the Lowlands and has the level shore and the constantly moving clouds that inspired the Dutch and then Boudin, Daubigny, Jongkind, and Monet.²²

In his 1874 essay on Manet, Mallarmé noted that the painter’s suggestion of atmosphere in The Swallows unifies modern naturalistic motifs and approaches with a “terrifyingly meticulous” sense of conception and form: “The impression of open-air comes first; and these women, all to themselves in their daydreaming or their contemplation, are anyway only accessories in the composition, as it is fitting that they are perceived in so grand a space by the eye of the painter, caught by the singular harmony of their grey fabrics and of a September afternoon.”²³ This is no unfinished work that merits rejection, as the Salon jury would have it, but a masterpiece in harmony that creatively merges the “truth” of modern life within a traditional genre scene. Manet’s Swallows thus redefines the bucolic landscape, traditionally understood as a countryside backdrop, as a modern “étude” that expresses the productive dissonances between a pastoral setting (complete with cows) and the ephemeral imprints of modern life. The suggestion of air unifies the structure of the windmill (industry), the birds’ wingbeats (nature), and the fashionable veils and frocks sported by the women in the foreground (fashion). If, as Mallarmé notes, “the impression of open-air comes first,” a “singular harmony” that holds all of its disparate elements together is the result.²⁴

Manet’s air, in its suggestion of ephemerality, new possibilities within the pastoral tradition, and musical harmony, would become the hallmark signature of Mallarmé’s poetry. Margaret Werth has, in a penetrating study of the resonances between his poetry and Impressionist painting, recently traced the transformative role of air in Mallarmé’s aesthetic:

In “The Impressionists and Manet,” the “medium of air” — “space with the transparence of air alone” — breaks down distinctions between things (in Le Linge, for example, the figure, linen, washtub, flower, foliage and also the space around them) and between the signifying marks of the painting and their signifieds. “Air” suggests not only atmosphere or ambient space and the instantaneity and fleetingness of appearance and visibility, but also nothingness, silence, and a sous-texte rhythm of spacing, the “air or song” beneath the “text” of the painting.²⁵

More profound than our “formulaic” and surface-oriented notions of Impressionism as capturing fleeting moments or sensations, Impressionist paintings also suggest disruptions and voids: “In each painting anticipation and desire as well as the obscurity, suspension, and discontinuity associated with dream, fantasy, and memory complicate notions of the immediacy and contemporaneity of Impressionist plein-airisme.”²⁶ Impressionist plein-air paintings in particular point the way to the truth of an ideal poetry, since they evoke all of the gaps and spaces and thus yield a fuller picture of nature that is more suggestion than representation, more fragmentation than wholeness. In Mallarmé’s own words, new poets challenge stasis and monotony by trying to “put more air in the poem, to create a sort of fluidity and mobility between the big streams of verses,” and it is in this way that the alexandrine, “instead of becoming fussy and sedentary as it currently is, will from now on be freer, more unexpected, more aerated.”²⁷

Mallarmé spent over a decade working on “Afternoon of a Faun,” which, suggesting the subtle yet gentle effect of whirlwinds, elliptically recounts the story of a faun’s desire for elusive nymphs. The poem saw dramatic changes as Mallarmé re-fashioned it according to the skeptical responses of his peers and his exacting notions of the suggestions that poetry was supposed to convey.²⁸ The first version — entitled “Le Faune, intermède héroïque” [The Faun, heroic interlude] and envisioned as a play — was written in 1865 and ultimately abandoned due to the refusal of the Théâtre-Français to stage it. Ten years later, Mallarmé revisited the faun’s monologue and gave it the title “Improvisation d’un faune” [A Faun’s Improvisation], only to be rejected once again, this time by the editorial committee of the journal Parnasse contemporain. Finally, the poem received its definitive title in 1876 (including the important yet overlooked subtitle “Éclogue”²⁹) when Mallarmé published it as a luxury edition with Manet’s illustrations.³⁰ Thus, it was only when poet and artist fused that Mallarmé’s eclogue was brought to fruition.

Even in its early form, “Afternoon of a Faun” reflects Mallarmé’s conceptualization of a modern, Impressionistic plein-air eclogue. Mallarmé’s “fictive” eclogue air sustains the tension between seeing and dream, between voice and silence, between the senses and the poetic imagination. As he first started writing the poem in 1865, for example,³¹ Mallarmé underscored the distance between the beauty of an æstival poem and the realities of writing in the heat of a Provençal summer: “[Y]ou’ve no idea how difficult it is, sometimes impossible, to pursue one’s thought lucidly, in this summer heat, sometimes burning, sometimes stifling, but always conquering the animal in us.”³² Immersed in this atmosphere, he explicitly emphasizes the “truth” of the visible landscape and its languorous heat while simultaneously creating the sound of poetry. This tension is played out in the opening lines of the poem as the faun struggles to recall the physical traits of the nymphs as well as the details of his surroundings:

Faun, the illusion flees from the cold, blue eyes
Of the chaster nymph like a fountain gushing tears;
But the other, all in sighs, you say, compares
To a hot wind through the fleece that blows at noon?
No! through the motionless and weary swoon
Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning,
Save from my flute, no waters murmuring
In harmony flow out into the groves³³

The faun’s flute music compensates for the lack of “hot wind” within the stifling landscape.

The evolution of the poem undergoes the exacting process of élimination that, in its evocation of a poet capturing impressions rather than detailed representations, became central to Mallarmé’s endless search for a pure poetry.³⁴ Gradually leaving more and more room for the “inspiration” of air, the poet reduces the original details of setting and décor to mere suggestion. While initially a fuller exchange between the faun and the elusive nymphs, Mallarmé aerated the later version into a monologue in which the focus moves from a charged desire heightened by the nymphs’ presence to the faun’s doubt and growing sense of frustration as he internalizes, not only a missed opportunity, but his failure to remember if this opportunity arose in the first place: “Did I love a dream?”³⁵ Having escaped the faun’s grasp (whether in dream or reality), the nymphs also remain secluded from the reader’s view; the faun’s frustrated desire thus matches the reader’s as we try to latch onto a clear image, a traditional sense of narrative, as well as onto customary syntax and prosodic conventions.

Though the subtitle of the final version of the poem is “Éclogue,” the beginning lines jolt the reader out of any sense of familiar place or literary topos. The original French underscores Mallarmé’s enigmatic phrasing, which produces the visual effect of air as it destabilizes the sense of the nymphs’ physical presence:

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.
                                                          Si clair,
Leur incarnat léger, qu’il voltige dans l’air
Assoupi de sommeils touffus.

These nymphs that I would perpetuate:
                                                          so clear
And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air
Heavy with leafy slumbers.³⁶

Emulating a plein air painter, Mallarmé aims to keep up with all of the constantly changing effects produced by the afternoon æstival landscape; yet, as a poet looking to produce what Werth aptly calls a “sous-texte rhythm,” the material weight of the visual is countered with his lyric’s disorienting yet rejuvenating “more air.” Enjambments, abrupt line breaks, ellipses, and the blank of the page highlight the effects of the poem’s invisible yet turbulent movements:

Consider…

                          if the women of your glosses
Are phantoms of your fabulous desires!³⁷

Swans blur with naiads, and reeds morph into pipes:

That cutting hollow reeds my art would tame,
I saw far off, against the glaucous gold
Of foliage twined to where springs run cold,
An animal whiteness languorously swaying;
To the slow prelude that the pipes were playing,
This flight of swans—no! naiads—rose in a shower
Of spray…³⁸

The visual wavering form of the verse (accentuated by use of italics, which reflect the faun’s exhalation as he speaks) is reminiscent of reeds, pliant and undulating yet strongly rooted, at once traditional alexandrine and iconoclastic experimentation, vegetation and music. Along with the shift from staged scene to intense introspection, from narration to abstract form, the second and final versions of “Afternoon of a Faun” explicitly refer to Syrinx, the chaste nymph in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who, after pleading with her sister nymphs, manages to escape the satyr Pan’s lustful pursuit by transforming into cattail reeds (Fig. 9). The faun’s only consolation is that he is later able to fashion these reeds into panpipes (as a common noun, the Greek word ‘syrinx’ refers to the musical instrument). The allusion to this myth not only resonates with the subject of Mallarmé’s poem, and explicitly links Pan’s music with that of the poet, but supports speculation that Mallarmé’s initial source of inspiration for “Afternoon of a Faun” was François Boucher’s painting Pan and Syrinx (1759) (Fig. 10).³⁹

Yet, the classical allusions to Syrinx and Salon painting of the ancien régime ultimately dematerialize due to Mallarmé’s plein air sensibilities. The poet not only strives to keep up with atmospheric effects, but reinvents the pastoral: “Mallarmé’s insistence that lines of poetry exist as newly invented words, in which each element confers some of its intellectual and sonorous content onto the surrounding elements, is indeed very close to his vision of open-air painting.”⁴⁰ With “Afternoon of a Faun,” Mallarmé thus presents a sensual “modern eclogue”⁴¹ in which

[T]he faun chooses to portray himself not in a musician’s attitude but in the pose of a painter, looking at his ideal or real model with a vague and fixed gaze … to be better able to translate a too sensual vision in the purity of art and the symmetry of form; to reshape that vision into a mental composition that will be, in the faun’s words, “sonore” [sonorous], or harmonic…⁴²

Through a process of Ovidian metamorphosis that takes us from a conventional pastoral to a modern plein-air eclogue, the poem’s later form emulates a Manet painting, which for Mallarmé has an “aspect at once solid and vaporous.”⁴³ The faun’s pipes play the role of this “aspect,” as his (musical) air renders an otherwise oppressive scene nebulous and seductive:

Enough! Arcana such as these disclose their nature
Only through vast twin reeds played to the skies,
That, turning to music all that clouds the eyes,
Dream, in a long solo, that we amused
The beauty all around us by confused
Equations with our credulous melody⁴⁴

Mallarmé’s impressionistic eclogue, while anchored in an immobile Sicilian backdrop, nevertheless flutters due to the faun’s hazy sense of memory and perception, as well as to the breeze of inspiration that animates the scene: “Art for Mallarmé is essentially this subtilisation of solid reality.”⁴⁵ The “ordinary fantasies” of the nymphs’ sensual bodies (so prominent in traditional pastoral paintings, such as Boucher’s) dissolve into melodic “sonorities”:

And dream that the song can make love soar so high
That, purged of all ordinary fantasies
Of back or breast — incessant shapes that rise
In blindness — it distills sonorities
From every empty and monotonous line.⁴⁶

The touch of the finger that lightly and fleetingly brushes one of the nymphs (“holding by a finger”)⁴⁷ is the same one that Mallarmé describes as creating the “calm seduction” of Manet’s Swallows, “a charm that could be easily broken by a single added touch.”⁴⁸

From the 1875 “improvisation” version to the final 1876 luxury edition of “Afternoon of a Faun,” Mallarmé’s suggestion of air through typesetting continued to prompt a plethora of changes: “I would like a rather tight typeface, one that adapts to the condensation of the verse, but with air between the lines, some space, so that they stand well apart from each other, which is necessary even with their condensation.”⁴⁹ Now peppered with blank spaces, broken lines, and italics — as demonstrated in the examples cited above — the poem’s form evokes the effects of the faun’s breath as he produces a “long solo”⁵⁰ within this riverside landscape. It is evident in his Japanese-inspired woodblock print of the faun that Manet took pains to underscore the protagonist’s breath, which takes the form of strong etchings of lines that accompany the rejuvenating air that circulates throughout the poem (Fig. 11). Leaving room for air with his departure from tradition, his experimentation with form, his unique presentation of words on the page, and with his “new space” of image accompaniment, Mallarmé fashions an eclogue “that reacts against the very convention on which it feeds.”⁵¹Attenuating the vibrant colors, clear images, and the corporeal presence of flesh and blood prevalent in traditional representations of the myth (Fig. 9, 10) as well as in his initial version of the poem,⁵² Mallarmé leaves us at the close of the poem with a mere shadow: “Couple, farewell; I’ll see the shade that now you are.”⁵³

However, there is one element that remains constant and illuminated throughout the poem: the faun’s revival of withered grapes, a re-swelling that is performed through the air of his breath.

And when I’ve sucked the brightness out of grapes,
To quell the flood of sorrow that escapes,
I’ll lift the empty cluster to the sky,
Avidly drunk till evening has drawn nigh,
And blow in laughter through the luminous skins.⁵⁴

Through a turn to art as the sublimation of desire in the 1875 and 1876 versions of the poem,⁵⁵ Mallarmé’s more nuanced palette and “monotonous”⁵⁶ yet hypnotic verse shift our attention from the sensuality of the sylvan scene to the erotic process of art itself. A seemingly small and traditional bucolic detail, the engorged grapes in fact represent “an admirable symbolic evocation of an essential principal of the Mallarméan esthetic: that of the ‘divine transposition’ that ‘goes from the fact to the ideal’.”⁵⁷ The grapes’ abundant air reflects the capacity of the poet to connect all elements of the poem with a fluctuating force that hovers between stasis and movement, between reality and imagination. The plump fruit, in other words, represent not only the kernel of Mallarmé’s poem, but the Impressionist aesthetic in general, and it is important to note that one of Manet’s few illustrations of the poem centers on the grapes and serves as the book’s final send-off (Fig. 12). Impressionism is not only the capturing of the real thing, but of the regenerating air that the artist lends to his work of art. The “luminous skins” of the grapes capture this air and allow us to view its subtle but potent essence.

Venti seeks to acknowledge and preserve “relevant approaches to understanding the world and its atmosphere today.”⁵⁸ Is Mallarmé and Manet’s plein air aesthetic still relevant in the context of today’s polluted air and rapidly warming climate? Is there a non-toxic or uncontaminated way for the poet or artist to capture nature’s “calm seduction?” Is a modern eclogue even possible in 2021? Patrick McGuinness’s homage to Mallarmé in his poem “Blue” suggests that a “virgin air” now remains an illusion:

Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure! ... all that was before:
before we rode it in planes or used it in park satellites,
or as an ethereal landfill for our emissions. All the best skies

these days are polluted: jet-fuel-refracted intricacies
of dead air and carbon-dazzle, cyanose confetti
that we mistake for light as we mistake mirrors

for what they show us of ourselves. But the thought
of all that emptiness, its promise of fresh starts, persists…⁵⁹

Yet, though carbon footprints and vehicle emissions are twenty-first century concerns, the persistent “promise of fresh starts” suggested by our expanse of sky corresponds to Manet’s commitment to presenting new ways of seeing with each painting, similar to the way in which the “long solo” in Mallarmé’s “Faun” offers a means to counter the most stifling of environments with the seduction of air. Notably, Manet went so far as to fuse the eclogue with the setting of a plein air Paris undergoing intense urbanization and industrialization. Though seemingly far removed from a summer idyll, his Le Chemin de fer [The Railroad] (1874) has been described as a peaceful “eclogue with accompaniment of smoke and clangor … in a harmonious and serene vision of the industrial world” (Fig. 13).⁶⁰ Nature plays an essential role in this otherwise seemingly urban and industrial tableau: “Motion, sun, clear air, reflections, all give the impression of nature, but nature subtly grasped, and finely rendered.”⁶¹ The floral decorations, the dozing puppy, the somehow serene evocation of steam, and the pops of green reinforce the sense of a pastoral air.

Perhaps this explains why Manet added a bunch of grapes above his signature in the bottom right corner of the painting (Fig. 14). As a representation of contemporary and ephemeral urban “nymphs,” with an expansive cloud of steam underscoring the dominant and unifying force of air in the modern work of art, the Impressionistic eclogue liberates natural and human forms from oppressive staging and a fetish for finish and convention. The painting’s “obscurities, its surprises are in part Manet’s way of drawing attention to the application of paint to canvas that alone should express what he has to say, just as Mallarmé’s arrangements of words creates the meaning of his poems.”⁶² Both painter and poet expand the domain of plein air, creating a new eclogue that is more inclusive (even “radical and democratic”)⁶³ in its channeling of atmospheric effects into experimental form, as well as its reach towards modern motifs and even the contemporary urban environment. The luminous grapes indelibly left behind by Mallarmé and Manet, “that perfect world- / shaped formula for all or nothing: O,”⁶⁴ continue to contain the translucent promise of airy swallows, restorative breezes, and swathes of green in an otherwise menacingly saturated and contaminated air.