Boating

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Boating: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Work Overview: Boating
Edouard Manet
Date: 1874; Paris, France *
Style: Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 1/4 x 51 1/4 in. (97.2 x 130.2 cm

Manet summered at Gennevilliers in 1874, often spending time with Monet and Renoir across the Seine at Argenteuil, where Boating was painted. Beyond adopting the lighter touch and palette of his younger Impressionist colleagues, Manet exploits the broad planes of color and strong diagonals of Japanese prints to give inimitable form to this scene of outdoor leisure. Rodolphe Leenhoff, the artist’s brother-in-law, is thought to have posed for the sailor but the identity of the woman is uncertain.

Shown in the Salon of 1879, Boating was deemed "the last word in painting" by Mary Cassatt, who recommended the acquisition to the New York collectors Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer.

Manet summered at Gennevilliers in 1874, often spending time with Monet and Renoir across the Seine at Argenteuil, where Boating was painted. Beyond adopting the lighter touch and palette of his younger Impressionist colleagues, Manet exploits the broad planes of color and strong diagonals of Japanese prints to give inimitable form to this scene of outdoor leisure. Rodolphe Leenhoff, the artist’s brother-in-law, is thought to have posed for the sailor but the identity of the woman is uncertain.

Shown in the Salon of 1879, Boating was deemed "the last word in painting" by Mary Cassatt, who recommended the acquisition to the New York collectors Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer.

Boating was painted in the summer of 1874 when Manet was at the family home at Gennevilliers on the Seine, opposite Argenteuil. At this time he was frequently joined by Claude Monet, who had been living in Argenteuil for some time, and occasionally by Renoir. Manet painted Monet and his wife and it was at this period that he came closest to adopting the impressionist idiom of working in the open air, using short rapid brushstrokes and adopting a much higher key than in his earlier work. This painting however is in many ways still tied to Manet's traditional practice. It is much larger than the portable canvases Monet and Renoir were using at this time and this would suggest it was done in the studio. Similarly, there is none of the apparent spontaneity that characterized impressionist works of this period, particularly in the rather contrived nature of the composition, which owes much to careful planning and is closest in spirit to Japanese prints.

This picture was painted during the summer of 1874, when Manet was working with Monet and Renoir at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine northwest of Paris. The influence of the two young Impressionist painters on Manet is evident in the subject matter - a celebration of the everyday pleasures of the middle class - and in the fact that Manet's dark, Spanish palette has given way here to high-keyed hues. The flattened composition, in which the high viewpoint causes the water's surface to rise up as a backdrop, is cut off at the edges of the canvas, reflecting Manet's interest, shared with the Impressionists, in Japanese prints.

The Argenteuil (of vertical format) and the Boating (of horizontal format) are two open air genre portraits - rather than landscapes - which Manet painted in August 1874 at Argenteuil. The vertical-format painting is structurally the tighter thanks to its linear components, and is also the richest in motifs and forms. The sketchy horizontal-format picture uses large spaces of glowing colour. We do not know who the women in these paintings are; the man was either Manet's brother-in-law, the Dutch painter Rodolphe Leenhoff, or Baron Barbier.

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Edouard Manet

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