MANET, Edouard
(b. 1832, Paris, d. 1883, Paris)

Boating

1874
Oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This picture was painted during the summer of 1874, when Manet was working with Monet and Renoir at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine northwest of Paris. The influence of the two young Impressionist painters on Manet is evident in the subject matter - a celebration of the everyday pleasures of the middle class - and in the fact that Manet's dark, Spanish palette has given way here to high-keyed hues. The flattened composition, in which the high viewpoint causes the water's surface to rise up as a backdrop, is cut off at the edges of the canvas, reflecting Manet's interest, shared with the Impressionists, in Japanese prints.

The Argenteuil (of vertical format) and the Boating (of horizontal format) are two open air genre portraits - rather than landscapes - which Manet painted in August 1874 at Argenteuil. The vertical-format painting is structurally the tighter thanks to its linear components, and is also the richest in motifs and forms. The sketchy horizontal-format picture uses large spaces of glowing colour. We do not know who the women in these paintings are; the man was either Manet's brother-in-law, the Dutch painter Rodolphe Leenhoff, or Baron Barbier.