Rochefort's Escape

In 1874 the journalist Henri Rochefort, deported to a prison colony in New Caledonia for his part in the Paris Commune, slipped away by boat and made it back to Europe. Six years later, after an amnesty let the exiled Communards return, Manet took up this very recent piece of news and treated it the way painters had once treated ancient battles. There is almost no drama on the surface: a small open boat, a few men bent over the oars, a great grey stretch of empty sea. This is the smaller of two versions he painted. Manet finished it in 1881 and died two years later, in 1883.