In addition to the famous Manet seascapes in oils, the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer entitled Manet and the American Civil War features a good bit of history about the actual battle between the warships Kearsarge and Alabama, as well as several photographs and lithographs of the battle, the ships, and the site where the battle took place off the coast of Cherbourg, France. You get a glimpse into a fascination with the sea and boats that inspired Manet. He had tried for a career in the French Navy before taking up painting. The show also features two Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige, which influenced Manet and many of his peers stylistically, and some paintings made by other artists, such as Claude Monet, which seem to be inspired by Manet's seascapes. What interested me the most about the show, though, were two comparisons of pictures: a comparison of three small works by Manet, and also a comparison of Manet's Battle painting and another painting of the same subject by a different painter.

Hanging close together are three small seascapes by Manet. The first that I looked at is Seascape (ca.1868). Etching and aquatint is the medium, and therefore the scene is described entirely with lines/hatching. There is a great deal of modeling and perspective shown with the density of marks. The next picture is a very loose watercolor titled Seascape with Sailing Ships (1864-68). In this one, there are hardly any distinct marks, everything is described with tone and value contrast. Then the third picture, a double-page from a sketchbook, is called Steamboat (1868). Here the technique Manet chose is a combination of those of the two other pictures. The scene is described in watercolor and loosely, but this time all in brush strokes. So the describing is done with marks again, but larger, broader, less careful ones; with color and value stepping in to give the marks meaning. The wall texts describe the subjects (the particular boats and harbor views) and compositions as they relate to the larger paintings in oil on canvas (except for Seascape with Sailing Ships, which doesn't really have any accompanying text), but it interests me much more to see how Manet experimented with different ways of seeing and describing this subject that he loved. I don't know if the curators intended it, but the juxtaposition of these three pictures seemed to give me a key insight into how Manet painted.

The curators of this show officially make a comparison between the "star" painting, Manet's The Battle of the "Kearsarge" and the "Alabama" (1864), and Henri Durand-Brager's Battle between U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and C.S.S. "Alabama" (1864). Manet's painting is of an imaginary scene based probably on newspaper illustrations and prints, but Durand-Brager might actually have witnessed the battle. Both paintings were executed very quickly, within a month. Durand-Brager had been an official French navy painter, and the captain of the Kearsarge had complimented him on his painting's "remarkable exactitude". But to my modern-world eye, Manet's painting looks much more vivid and lively, as though I am actually watching the battle. This is likely due to what are now called Manet's "innovations," for which he suffered so much criticism in his day. He rejects a low horizon line and single focus. There are two boats in focus in the painting, and one is clearly much more near the viewer than the other. Then there are less distinct boats far in the background and foreground. But some of the water in between the boats on which we are focusing is rendered indistinct and some is distinct! Manet has made sort of a path of focus with the water between the two main boats, leading the eye. This mimics reality in the way that one would focus one's eyes on one boat, then refocus to look at the other. It contrasts remarkably with the more conventional use of perspective in the Durand-Brager painting, which seems quite static after looking at the Manet painting.

This exhibition is not large, but could be enjoyed in a large variety of ways. For me, it's biggest value was a glimpse into Manet's thinking, and a good illustration of some of his innovations in painting by way of comparison with another painter's interpretation of the same scene.