La evasión de Rochefort

Henri Rochefort was a firebrand journalist deported to a penal colony in New Caledonia for his part in the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1874 he slipped away by rowing out to a passing ship, one of the great escape stories of the day. Manet waited years to paint it. Only after the amnesty of July 1880 let the communards come home did he take up the subject, six years after the event. He gives you almost no drama, just a small open boat, a knot of men bent to the oars, and a huge grey-green swell of ocean that seems ready to swallow them. The distant ship they are steering for is a faint smudge on the horizon.