Marina ad Arcachon

Manet spent the winter of 1870 inside besieged Paris, serving in the National Guard artillery, while his wife and his mother waited the war out in the south-west. The siege ended in January 1871 and he went after them. In March the family rented the Chalet Servantie at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast and stayed about a month, and Manet painted the bay from it again and again on canvases roughly the size of a sheet of paper. This one is 25 centimetres high. While he was working there the Commune took hold of Paris and the army came in to break it. He was back in the city by early summer, and what he made from that was a lithograph of a firing squad shooting men at a barricade.