![]() ![]() Over the years, various other identities have been suggested, from Manet’s writer-friend George Moore and his mistress (Mather 1930), to the French naturalist short-story master Guy de Maupassant (Gallas 1934) and Maupassant’s friend Baron Barbier (Blanche 1938) for the man and Suzanne Leenhoff (Salinger 1947 Kimball and Venturi 1948), Camille Monet (Adler 1986), and a professional model (Cachin 1990) for the woman. Manet appears to have depicted these same two sitters in a very similar composition shortly before (see Related Works below). Leenhoff was the brother of Manet’s Dutch wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and was a painter, too. While the male boater with his left hand on the tiller most often has been associated with Manet’s brother-in-law Rodolphe Leenhoff (first so-identified in Lochard 1883–84), there has been much less of a consensus as to the female sitter’s identity. At bottom and even at the female sitter’s bodice, the brushstrokes of blue paint Manet used to compose her dress exceed the contours of the garment, seeming to fly off into space and also emphasizing the planar aspects of the composition. Rather than use the canvas as a traditionally illusory three-dimensional window onto another world, Manet chose to emphasize the flat, two-dimensional aspects of the painting by making the viewer’s vantage point very low, omitting a horizon line and any visible land beyond the water, and employing an increasingly smooth texture in the brushstrokes as they mount to the top of the broad plane of blue water. The figures have been brought up to the very foreground so that the viewer might have immediate entry into the scene. The sail at right is rendered at an odd angle, leaving the subject of the sitters’ activity barely cropped into view. The artist worked to unify the composition through both color and line in these ways. While the black ribbon on her hat at left runs parallel to the sail’s sheet at right, the blue-green ribbon on his hat as well as the blues of her dress echo the various blues of the water that dominate the image. The netting on her hat could keep away such possible intrusions from outdoor life as river water and dust, then believed to be harmful to one’s health (see Marni Kessler, Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris, Minneapolis, 2006). More specifically, his white shirt, white flannel trousers, and straw boater with a blue border have been identified as the uniform of the tony Cercle nautique boating club, headquartered in Asnières (Herbert 1988). The male and female boaters in The Met’s picture are out to "see and be seen" in the new casual dress favored for such sporty outings, a jaunty white boating outfit with a straw hat for him and a maritime blue-striped dress with a white hat for her. The Painting: In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet painted this ode to the relatively new bourgeois and upper class Parisian leisure activity, boating on the Seine, when he was living at his family’s property in Gennevilliers across the river from Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir in Argenteuil (both communes northwest of Paris). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |