The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama

Painted in 1864-1865 and now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama depicts a real naval engagement from the American Civil War — the Union warship Kearsarge sinking the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg in June 1864. Manet witnessed the smoke of the battle from the shore and later painted it from a small boat on the water. The subject was unusual for him: a specific historical event, painted immediately rather than reconstructed. Yet his treatment is characteristically resistant to heroism — the distant ships are tiny, the vast sea and sky dominating the canvas.

The composition is dominated by water and sky — the ships mere dark silhouettes at the picture's centre, almost lost in the spatial expanse. Manet renders the sea's surface with horizontal strokes of grey-green and pale blue, the waves built with confident direction brushwork. The smoke of battle rises as a pale diagonal. The scale of sea versus ship creates a deliberately unheroic treatment of a celebrated military event.