Argenteuil

The summer of 1874 was the season the younger painters broke away, mounting their own show in Paris rather than face the official Salon. Manet, older and already notorious, would not join them. Instead he spent that summer near Argenteuil on the Seine, beside his friend Monet, and drew their bright open-air manner into this canvas, then sent it to the very Salon the others had rejected. The critics fixed on the water. That broad expanse behind the sailor and his companion is a deep, frank blue, not the muddy green a river was supposed to be, and reviewers found it absurd. One defender answered that if the Seine looked blue that day, blue it would be. The man leaning at the rail is Manet's own brother-in-law.