The Steamboat, Seascape with Porpoises

Manet spent the summer of 1868 at Boulogne-sur-Mer, a port that ran a packet service across to Folkestone and filled each season with Parisians. He painted the sea there repeatedly, usually pushing the horizon high so the water takes most of the canvas. Here a steamer under way shares the picture with a carefully drawn sailing ship and with a group of porpoises breaking the surface, a creature that had been swimming through marine imagery since Greek and Roman art. The handling is loose enough that the painting was long grouped with the large canvases Manet brought back from an earlier stay at Boulogne in 1864. A watercolour in one of his sketchbooks from 1868 moved it to the later summer. It has been in the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1954.