[1] He presented it to the Paris Salon jury, which accepted it and exhibited it on 15 June 1857, with five other paintings of his authorship, two portraits and three landscapes.

It was bought by Courbet's friend and patron Étienne Baudry (1830–1908), then was bequeathed by him to the painter's sister Juliette, who left it to the French state in 1906.

[2] It is a canvas of large dimensions representing two women lying in the grass beneath trees, at the edge of the river.

The modernity of the subject announces the great pictorial fortune of the banks of the Seine, celebrated by the Impressionists, a generation later.

This work, singular for its modern subject and its unusual large format for a genre scene, upset the rules of the art of his time.