Courbet's portrayal of fashionably dressed Parisian women lounging during a sultry summer day generated yet another scandal at the Salon of 1857. Courbet's title alone was provocative, as it was clear that these women were not young ladies. The painting is laden with sexual innuendo—from the lushness of the vegetation and the women's languor to the semi-undressed state of the foreground figure and the man's hat suggestively placed in the boat. There is also the possibility of a liaison between the two women, prefiguring the explicit eroticism of Sleep, painted a decade later.

As an image of contemporary leisure, the painting anticipates the work of Manet and the Impressionists from the 1860s and 1870s; the picnickers of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) have their antecedent in Courbet's provocative "young ladies." The artist Henri Matisse owned two sketches related to this painting.