Boating

Boating, painted in 1874 at Argenteuil during the summer Manet spent alongside Monet and Renoir, is one of the works that most clearly shows the Impressionist influence on his palette and brushwork. The boldly cropped composition — a man in a white sailing suit at the tiller of a small boat, the water rising flat to the upper edge of the canvas — reflects his absorption of Japanese compositional principles through the prints that circulated widely in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds this canvas, has recognized it as one of Manet's most formally adventurous works, its compressed space and unmodulated blue water anticipating the decorative flattening that would become central to late nineteenth-century painting.

Manet applied paint in broad, confident strokes with notably freer handling than his earlier work — the water rendered in flat, unmodulated blue that rejects Impressionist shimmer in favor of a bold decorative statement. His palette is high-keyed and assertive, the white of the sailor's suit set against brilliant blue, with each element of the composition handled with the declarative confidence of an artist reinventing his approach through direct observation.