Artwork · 19th century · Edouard Manet

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Boating

Edouard Manet1874Oil on canvas97.2 × 130.2 cm

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At a glance

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A man in white and a straw hat steers a small sailboat, while a woman in a blue striped dress leans back beside him, looking out at the water.
Edouard Manet painted it in oil in the summer of 1874, on the Seine near Paris.
There is no sky and no riverbank, only turquoise water behind them, so it feels as if we are sitting in the same boat.

Reading the picture

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Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on the man's face. His straw hat has a turquoise band, and he wears a thick mustache. He looks straight at us. It is as if he has just noticed that we climbed aboard.
Look at the woman's hat. Black ribbons trail from a white bonnet, and a thin veil blows across her face. The veil is just a few strokes of white paint, yet you can see her cheek and nose through it. A small hoop earring glints at her ear.
Move down and zoom in on her dress. Quick blue and white strokes pile up to make the stripes. Up close it looks less like cloth and more like moving water.
Zoom in on the upper right. A gray sail tied to a wooden spar leans at an angle, and a rope runs down into the boat. The top of the sail is cut off by the edge of the canvas. Manet does not show us the whole boat. He crops it, the way you would see it if you were sitting inside.

When it was painted

In the summer of 1874, Manet was forty-two. He spent the season at his family's property at Gennevilliers, on the Seine. Across the river, in Argenteuil, lived Claude Monet, and Manet often joined Monet and Renoir there.

That spring, Monet and his friends had held the group show later known as the first Impressionist exhibition. Manet was close to them, but he stayed out of it and kept sending his work to the official Salon. Still, that summer he set up his easel outdoors in bright daylight, just as his friends did. He painted Monet at work in his little studio boat, and he painted the Monet family resting in their garden.

On the day Manet painted the Monet family, Renoir happened to arrive and painted the same scene right beside him. The two pictures are now in two museums: Manet's at the Met, and Renoir's at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The man at the tiller has long been identified as Rodolphe Leenhoff, Manet's brother-in-law. He was the brother of Manet's wife, Suzanne, and a painter himself. Who the woman is remains an open question.

Five years later, Boating hung at the Salon of 1879, alongside In the Conservatory. The painter Mary Cassatt admired it greatly. In 1895, when it was with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, she urged her friends the Havemeyers to buy it. Louisine Havemeyer's bequest brought it to the Met in 1929.

Look again at the background, all water and no sky. The summer Manet spent by the river with his friends lives on in that single sheet of turquoise.

The painter

Edouard Manet

1832–1883

When painting this, the artist was about 42 years old

All paintings by Edouard Manet →

More by the same painter

The Spanish Singer1860

Young Lady in 18661866

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find what each of the man's hands is holding?
Why?Why do you think Manet left out the sky and the riverbank and filled the background with water?
What about you?A hundred and fifty years ago, Parisians went out on the river on weekends to rest. Do we have enough time today to step away from work and simply rest?

Same period