Sea View, Calm Weather
This conversation is connected to Sea View, Calm Weather.
Manet painted Sea View, Calm Weather in 1864, likely during a trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern French coast. Dark-sailed fishing boats and a single steamer trailing smoke sit scattered across a flat turquoise sea, with a pale sky pressing down from above. The composition is strikingly simple — mostly water, the boats painted as quick dark silhouettes, the horizon line sitting high. Manet admired seventeenth-century Dutch marine painting, and this has some of that spare, horizontal quality, but the flatness of the color and the looseness of the brushwork are entirely his own. The painting is now in the Art Institute of Chicago.