Battle of Kearsage and Alabama

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Battle of Kearsage and Alabama: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - Battle of Kearsage and Alabama

Keywords: Battle, Kearsage, Alabama

Work Overview: The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1864
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 134 cm × 127 cm (53 in × 50 in)
Location Museum of Art, Philadelphia

The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama is an 1864 oil painting by Édouard Manet. The painting commemorates the Battle of Cherbourg of 1864, a naval engagement between the Union cruiser USS Kearsarge and the rebel privateer CSS Alabama. Not having witnessed the battle himself, Manet relied on press descriptions of the fight to document his work.

In 1872, Barbey d'Aurevilly stated that the painting was a "magnificiant marine painting" and that "the sea ... is more frightening than the battle".[2] It was hung at Alfred Cadart's and was praised by the critic Philippe Burty.

Manet's interests in the sea and in painting subjects from modern life are perfectly joined in this rendering of an important naval battle of the American Civil War that occurred off the French coast. In June 1864, the Alabama, a raider outfitted by the Confederate government, ducked into the harbor at Cherbourg on the north coast of France to release prisoners and take on coal. Eight days later, when she emerged from the harbor, the Union ship the Kearsarge was waiting outside in international waters. The two ships circled one another, firing shots for over an hour until the Alabama was hit and began to sink stern-first. Manet did not witness the engagement but read about it in the newspapers, and a month later he exhibited this picture in the window of a Paris gallery. Three-quarters water, the painting uses a high horizon line and lurching perspective to suggest the chaotic aftermath of the battle. The two protagonists are clustered at the top, enshrouded in a cloud of smoke, while at the center of the picture, a heaving turquoise, blue, and gray sea tosses sailors clinging to wreckage and crashes against a local pilot boat racing to rescue them and others abandoning the sinking Alabama. Jennifer A. Thompson, from Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art (2007), p. 50.

This seascape enlivened by a naval engagement is one of the few works Manet painted entirely in blues and greens - a most difficult combination of colors. It is also one of the works that received the highest praise during his lifetime. The sea is excellently rendered by one who knows it well. Manet has taken one of Turner's favorite themes and treated it in a realistic manner. There is nothing to show that Claude Monet, Pissarro, and all the Impressionists would return later to the shuddering impacts, the clouds of smoke, and the mysterious and fearful suggestions of marine paintings by the great English Romantic. For Manet and the people of his day, this naval battle was a calm and even restful spectacle.

The painting records an incident in the Civil War, when on June 19, 1864, off Cherbourg, the Kearsarge, a corvette belonging to the United States Navy, attacked and sank the Alabama, a Southern privateer. The engagement was expected, and the Cherbourg hotels, already full to overflowing with American sailors, were turning away crowds that had flocked to see the sight. According to Tabarant, Manet was an eyewitness of the battle. Manet quickly portrayed the event, with the urgency of journalism or politics itself, much as he addressed global politics in his Execution of Maximilian.

As for viewers of the painting, the real struggle in this scene of combat is between the sea and the sky, between the waves, the smoke, and the clouds - the true pictorial elements of the canvas.

On June 19, 1864, the United States warship Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in one of the most celebrated naval engagements of the American Civil War. The battle was widely reported in the illustrated press and riveted public attention on both sides of the Channel. When Kearsarge later anchored off the French resort town of Boulogne-sur-Mer it was thronged by curious visitors, one of whom was the artist Édouard Manet. Although he did not witness the historic battle, Manet made a painting of it partly as an attempt to regain the respect of his colleagues after having been ridiculed for his works in the 1864 Salon. Manet's picture of the naval engagement and his portrait of the victorious Kearsarge belong to a group of his seascapes of Boulogne whose unorthodox perspective and composition would profoundly influence the course of French painting.

This book, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins by examining Manet's early experience of the sea, including the voyage to South America he took when he was sixteen years old. The detailed narrative of the battle that follows recounts the intriguing, at times clandestine history of the two ships, the tangled prelude to their encounter, and some of the vivid personalities involved. Manet's paintings and watercolors related to the battle are then considered in depth alongside numerous prints, photographs, letters, and archival newspaper illustrations that illuminate the stirring history of the episode and in some cases dispel lingering misconceptions. Manet's other Boulogne seascapes are also discussed in terms of their complex chronology and evolution. A final chapter touches on some of the sources for the seascapes—from Old Master paintings to Japanese woodblock prints—and traces the influence of the seascapes on such artists as Gustave Courbet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Claude Monet.

In the fertile years that followed his Déjeuner and Olympia, Manet experimented very widely. Sometimes he focused on giving form to colour and movement in works like the Bullfight, at others he was inspired by contemporary events, such as the Battle of the "Kearsarge" and the "Alabama" off Cherbourg. This episode of the American War of Independence made a considerable impression on public opinion. The work testified to Manet's modernity, but was also an attempt to renew the theme of naval combat traditional in Dutch painting. It is, in fact, a battle between colour and light, where the blacks and the few dots of red enhance the tumultuous green of the waves.

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