Édouard Manet

It got turned down by the big official Salon the year he made it, and Émile Zola wrote a defence of him in a newspaper that apparently annoyed enough readers to cost Zola the job. Wikipedia puts the flatness down to Japanese prints and Spanish painting, both of which he'd been looking hard at.

The official Salon rejected this, so it went into the side exhibition of rejects the emperor allowed that year, where crowds supposedly turned up mainly to laugh at it. It started out with a much duller title, something like 'The Bath', and the arrangement of the three of them is said to be lifted from a centuries-old engraving — which may have been part of the cheek.

The crowd is apparently packed with people he actually knew — family, writers, musicians, himself tucked in at one edge — put together from sketches made at open-air concerts. Critics at the time complained it looked slapped on rather than finished.

Apparently critics joked at the time that someone should just shut the shutters on this one — it got a rough reception when it first went up.