These identifications are now seen as incorrect; the man seated at the table, smoking a cigar and enjoying a coffee and a digestif, is anonymous—although he bears a resemblance to Manet (his friend, the painter Auguste Rousselin has also been suggested).

Given the uncertain status of Leenhoff's paternity, Jeffrey Meyers proposes that the two figures may nevertheless represent Suzanne and Édouard symbolically, specifically "their belated recognition and acceptance of Auguste [Manet]'s son".

[4] The painting was exhibited in the 1869 Paris Salon along with Manet's The Balcony, another work that lacked a simple genre affiliation, and in which at least one of the figures seems to confront the viewer as if challenging the "fourth wall".

In that case, having his back to the table, he has the wall between him and us, and his position no longer makes any sense... [A] feeling for functions, for appropriateness, is indispensable... Like the personages in a play, it's necessary that every figure in a painting is in its proper plane, fulfills its role, and thereby contributes to the expression of the general idea.

He spoke of "types without character, scenes devoid of all interest" and said disparagingly (yet insightfully from the point of view of modern criticism) that "Manet had made the portrait of a Balcony and a Luncheon".

[7] Meyers finds the depiction of Leenhoff similar in some respects to an 1855 portrait by Edgar Degas of his brother, Achille De Gas in the Uniform of a Cadet.

[8] Michael Fried sees the influence of the genre scenes of Vermeer, who had recently been "rediscovered" and popularized in France by Théophile Thoré-Bürger.

Collins explains, "Both Baudelaire and Manet were part of a circle of men devoted to the cat as embodiment of their own thoughtful, feminine, and spiritual essence.

In many respects it was, like Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, and Olympia, a defiant reworking of artistic tradition... the signatures of masculine bravery became cast-off props in a provincial dining-room, sharing the same dignity and distinction—no more, no less—as the potted plants, corked bottles and coffee urn.