For over two centuries, European art was dictated by the Academy, following the Greco-Roman guidelines to making good art. In 1863, Napoleon III founded the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition for the rejected artists from the Paris Salon, in which Édouard Manet was showing The Picnic. Today this painting is considered to be a landmark for the beginning of the modern painting, but at the time was seen as shocking and outrageous. A rupture was being taken place with the classic way of thinking art.
