Anguille et Rouget

In June 1864 the American Civil War turned up off the coast of France. The Union warship Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama within sight of Cherbourg, and Manet painted the battle, almost certainly without having seen it, then went to Boulogne-sur-Mer and painted the Kearsarge lying at anchor there. That same summer at Boulogne he painted fish. An eel and a red mullet laid on a cloth with a knife beside them, and behind them a darkness that never resolves into a room. The black is what later painters kept coming back to, Matisse among them. Manet showed the fish pieces in Paris early in 1865 next to his Dead Toreador, which was itself a piece he had cut out of the big bullfight canvas the critics had laughed at the previous spring.