海上の帆船

Manet came to the sea suddenly, in 1864. That June the Union warship Kearsarge caught the Confederate raider Alabama off Cherbourg on the French coast and sank it within sight of shore, and Manet turned the naval duel into one of his first seascapes. Marine painting seized him that year, and he made a run of canvases of open water and working sail like this one, two boats leaning into a grey swell. He was in his early 30s and still notorious in Paris for the nudes that had scandalised the Salon a year earlier. Out here there is no scandal, just the horizon set high on the canvas and the water laid down in broad, flat strokes.