The Steamboat, Seascape with Porpoises

Manet made two sea voyages in 1868 and recorded his impressions of ocean life in several seascape paintings unusual in his oeuvre. This Philadelphia Museum canvas showing a steamboat accompanied by porpoises captures the mix of industrial modernity and natural spectacle that characterized nineteenth-century maritime travel. Manet had studied the Dutch marine tradition and the seascapes of Courbet, and his own sea paintings engage with that lineage while bringing his characteristically direct, unidealized observation. The steamboat belching smoke surrounded by leaping porpoises creates an allegorical tension between the mechanical and the wild.

Manet renders the grey-green sea in broad, fluid horizontal strokes, with the steamboat's dark silhouette and smoke contrasting against the overcast sky. The porpoises are indicated with quick, decisive strokes of dark paint. The composition is dominated by the horizon line, with a low viewpoint that emphasizes the expanse of the ocean.