Seascape at Arcachon (Stormy Weather)

Manet stayed in Paris through the Prussian siege and served in the National Guard. In February 1871, with the fighting finished, he went south to find his family, who had left the city, and at the start of March they took a rented villa at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast below Bordeaux and stayed a month. While they were there Paris rose. The Commune took the city in the second half of March and held it until the army fought its way back in at the end of May. Manet made only a handful of canvases at Arcachon, all of them small, and this one is a band of choppy water under a storm, about 20 centimetres high. It also belongs to the first work he did properly out of doors rather than in the studio.