Boating, 1874, Édouard Manet, oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.115. Image: www.metmuseum.org
Transcript
SCOTT ALLAN: Presumably, these are Parisian day-trippers, leisure boating on the Seine.
NARRATOR: Boating was a popular—and modern—recreational activity for the bourgeoisie in Paris. Manet makes his sitters equally au courant. Art Institute of Chicago curator Gloria Groom.
GLORIA GROOM: He’s using a much more open brushwork for her dress, to simulate the glint of sunlight on the blue and white stripes of her dress. She’s got the voile, the veil that comes down over her eyes and she’s wearing a very fashionable hat at the time.
SCOTT ALLAN: And then her companion who’s a bit of a swaggering guy with his thighs widely spread, his torso twisting, and he’s dressed in these really spiffy boaters’ whites.
NARRATOR: His costume and the straw boater hat with a blue band indicate he’s a member of the Cercle Nautique, an exclusive French boating club. He doesn’t seem to notice the woman—he seems more interested in us.
GLORIA GROOM: We’re in the boat with them, because you wonder where the artist is, that he gets this viewpoint?
NARRATOR: What’s more, there is no horizon line or any other feature to orient the boat. All we see is water.
SCOTT ALLAN: You don’t see the riverbanks. You just have this wall of bright blue. Around the edges, the boat is quite abruptly cropped, sort of cut in half by the bottom framing edge, and we just get a little sliver of the boom and the sail in the upper right corner.
NARRATOR: This off-center, closely cropped composition may have been influenced by Japanese prints, very much in vogue among the Impressionists.
