Steamboat Leaving Boulogne

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Steamboat Leaving Boulogne: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - Steamboat Leaving Boulogne

Keywords: Steamboat, Leaving, Boulogne

Work Overview: Steamboat Leaving Boulogne
Edouard Manet
Date: 1864; Paris, France *
Style: Realism
Genre: marina
Oil on canvas
29 x 36 1/2 in. (73.6 x 92.6 cm)
Location: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, US

This is one of Édouard Manet’s earliest paintings of the sea, a subject to which he returned repeatedly. It is one of three or four works that he painted in Paris from sketches made on a vacation with his family in the northern port of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Though boldly brushed and almost calligraphic in form, the vessels remain identifiable as specific types. A side-wheel packet steamer heads up the Channel, leaving the slower sailing boats in its wake.

Edouard Manet became one of the most notorious painters in Paris when several of the controversial works he exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés shocked the public with their bold treatment of form, color, space, and sexually oriented themes. In the summer of the following year, perhaps seeking relief from the harsh criticism he had received, Manet left Paris for Boulogne-sur-Mer, a city on the northern Atlantic coast of France, where he painted marine subjects and still lifes of fish. He finished the still lifes there, but did not complete the marine paintings, including Steamboat Leaving Boulogne, until he returned to Paris. These works represent a breakthrough for the artist; although his bold, flat brushwork outraged his critics, it inspired his Impressionist colleagues in the next decade.
The Art Institute’s canvas can be considered the most striking marine painting that Manet made during this period. It has a high horizon line and is filled with a wall-like expanse of water against which various ships are represented. The raised horizon, flattened objects and space, and asymmetrical composition were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, which had become extremely popular in France at the time. Anticipating the sketchlike Impressionist style, Manet rendered the water in lively horizontal strokes of blue and green paint that allowed the weave of the canvas to bleed through in places. Such evidence of the canvas emphasizes the flatness of the picture surface, while the scale of the boats, slight narrowing of strokes toward the horizon, and diagonal direction of the trailing foam and smoke suggest receding space.

So what did the thoroughly French painter Édouard Manet (1832-83), who never visited the United States, have to do with the American Civil War?

Nothing, when you come right down to it. But like many of his countrymen, his attention was caught by the celebrated battle fought off the coast of Cherbourg in 1864 between two sailing ships, the Union's U.S.S. Kearsarge and a Confederate raider, the C.S.S. Alabama. Besides everything else, the action provided a grand entertainment for hordes of French spectators.

The Alabama was the most feared of a group of Confederate cruisers, purchased and outfitted mainly in England, that were attacking Union merchant vessels in retaliation for the blockade imposed on ports below North Carolina. Off Cherbourg, the Kearsarge lay in wait for it, and on Sunday, June 19, the two ships met and clashed. The Kearsarge sank the raider in about an hour and a half.

Manet did not see the battle but was inspired to make an imaginary painting of it, which he finished so quickly that it was placed on exhibition 26 days after the event. Several weeks later, after visiting the victorious Kearsarge as it basked at anchor off Boulogne, he produced a firsthand impression of the ship.

Both paintings, whose innovative aspects had an impact on other artists of the period, have been brought together with others bearing on the incident, a number of photographs and some memorabilia (including the Kearsarge's log and a piece of its flag), in a small but engrossing exhibition, ''Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of U.S.S. Kearsarge and C.S.S. Alabama'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show celebrates the Met's recent acquisition of Manet's firsthand impression, ''The Kearsarge at Boulogne.'' (The battle scene is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

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Manet's motivation for painting the Kearsarge is unclear, but scholars point out that several entirely unrelated works he had entered in Paris salons had been severely criticized. Perhaps, frustrated by the attacks, he wanted to redeem his reputation by fixing on a sensational subject of contemporary life that had attracted wide public attention.

A bit of not unrelated background here. As a teenager Manet rebelled against the wishes of his father, a magistrate, that he enter the legal profession, aspiring -- despite his artistic talent -- to a naval career. Although at 16 he had already flunked the entrance exam for the elite training school for French naval officers, he determined to take it again after spending the requisite time at sea. In his case that meant some four months as a paying guest with other young naval candidates on a small sailing ship that traveled between France and Brazil.

But score one for art history. He failed the exam for the second and last time. Et voilà! Within a year he was studying art in Paris. Still, he'd had, however briefly, close-up experience of ship life and the sea.

As for the Kearsarge paintings, many versions of the combat were quickly produced by various artists, among them a rather traditional oil by Henri Durand-Brager that also appears in this show. But if Manet took cues from anywhere, it could have been a view exhibited at the Louvre of Dutch ships off the coast of Amsterdam by a 17th-century Dutch artist, Ludolf Backhuysen, which had similar compositional elements.

Being Manet, however, he created a bold depiction of the battle scene that was very different from a literal documentary rendering. He wanted to do a history painting in a modern mode, and he succeeded. Done in muted but rich colors, his painting has no fixed center, with the scene appearing as if viewed from above. The eye wanders over the robustly painted stretch of sea that fills most of the canvas to a fairly narrow, smoke-blurred but luminous horizon.

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