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Boating by Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet · 1874-01-01

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Édouard Manet painted "Boating" in the summer of 1874, from his family's property at Gennevilliers, just across the Seine from Argenteuil where Claude Monet was working that same season. The painting now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It shows a man and a woman in a sailboat, close enough to touch, yet their silence is the picture's real subject.

Look at her face. The woman is believed to be Camille Monet, wife of Manet's friend and rival. Her gaze is turned down and away, past the white sail, refusing the frame the man occupies so comfortably. He is Rodolphe Leenhoff, Manet's brother-in-law, his hands on the tiller, his face a calm blank. The two figures, so near in the cramped boat, feel miles apart. Her dark bonnet is closed and formal against his airy summer boater: the whole difference between them is written in their clothes.

Manet painted this in a radical style. The water is a flat wall of Prussian blue with no horizon and no reflections, a visual choice that pushes toward abstraction. The boat is cropped sharply at the edges, pressing the figures right up against the picture plane. The effect is a snapshot of modern life in which the physical proximity of the two people only deepens their psychological distance.

When "Boating" appeared at the Salon in 1879, the American painter Mary Cassatt called it "the last word in painting." She may have understood that the real subject was not the sail or the sun, but the silence between two people who aren't looking at each other.

#arthistory #impressionism #edouardmanet

Details

Manet's most daring formal gamble: no reflections, no ripples, no horizon , a wall of cobalt that pushes toward abstraction two decades before Post-Impressionism fully arrived.
Manet's most daring formal gamble: no reflections, no ripples, no horizon , a wall of cobalt that pushes toward abstraction two decades before Post-Impressionism fully arrived.
Quintessential symbol of bourgeois summer leisure; the striped ribbon band dates it precisely to mid-1870s fashion, anchoring the scene to an exact social moment on the Seine.
Quintessential symbol of bourgeois summer leisure; the striped ribbon band dates it precisely to mid-1870s fashion, anchoring the scene to an exact social moment on the Seine.
Manet's loosely draped brushwork gives the dress enormous visual weight; the cool blue mass rhymes with the water behind, visually fusing the woman with the sea itself.
Manet's loosely draped brushwork gives the dress enormous visual weight; the cool blue mass rhymes with the water behind, visually fusing the woman with the sea itself.
Likely Manet's brother-in-law; his confident, slightly blank expression carries the painting's central ambiguity , are these two companions, strangers, or something more complicated?
Likely Manet's brother-in-law; his confident, slightly blank expression carries the painting's central ambiguity , are these two companions, strangers, or something more complicated?
Painted with the barest modeling , nearly chalky , yet reads as warm solid fabric; Manet allows raw underpainting to breathe through, a visible technique lesson in a single passage.
Painted with the barest modeling , nearly chalky , yet reads as warm solid fabric; Manet allows raw underpainting to breathe through, a visible technique lesson in a single passage.
Transcript

They look like a couple on the Seine. He steers. Relaxed, in control. The man is Manet's brother-in-law, Rodolphe Leenhoff. The woman is likely Camille Monet. Painted by her husband's rival. Her face is turned away. She looks beyond the sail, into the water. Two people. A marriage on one bank, a brother-in-law on the river. Manet painted this just across the Seine from where Monet was working.