舟遊び

In the summer of 1874 Manet was staying at his family's place at Gennevilliers, just across the Seine from Argenteuil, where Monet and Renoir were working out in the open air. Manet never called himself an Impressionist and refused to show with them, but you can see how much their world had gotten into him here. The man at the tiller, thought to be his brother-in-law Rodolphe Leenhoff, is dressed in summer whites, and the water behind him is a single flat sheet of bright blue that fills almost the whole canvas, cropped tight like a snapshot. That high, flattened blue owes a lot to the Japanese woodblock prints Manet collected. When the picture reached the Salon of 1879, the painter Mary Cassatt called it the last word in painting and steered it toward the American collectors who eventually gave it to New York.