High horizons: David Platzer reviews a remarkable exhibition of Manet's seascapes which moves this month from Philadelphia to Amsterdam. What did Manet learn from seventeenth-century Dutch art?

Edouard Manet is greatest in quantity familiar to the general public for his sights of Parisian life. In each particular, he was 'the painter of recent life' that his friend Charles Baudelaire called for in his critique of the 1845 Paris Salon a certain quantity of years before Manet, in 1845 a male child of thirteen, began his career. His best known works present to view Parisian bohemians picnicking in the grass, a weary, sad-eyed barmaid in an all-night bar, or a fragile-looking pouch Venus stretched our on her bed with a ribbon circular her neck as if she were her client's disdainful Christmas present

The revelation of this exhibition is that Manet must have worn out as much, if not more, time painting the world of the sea as he did urban settings. The thirty nine works of his upon display--mostly oil paintings but also including watercolours and sketches, including a work of the latter kept during his 1868 sojourn at Boulogne exhibit just how important the sea was to Manet. Moreover, the exhibition's organisers have also included works through Dutch seventeenth-century marine painters influential to Manet from visits to the Louvre and Holland, as well as works by dint of his contemporaries, including Courbet, Whistler and Boudin, as well as Impressionists Renoir, Monet and Morisot, illustrating where his seascapes came from and where longer-lived colleagues took his innovations.

Like all revolutionaries, Manet was essentially a traditionalist. The idea for his sum of two units fully-dressed men and completely [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] women came from Giorgione's (or Titian's) champetre in the Louvre. Baudelaire dismissed the similarities between Dutch paintings, of the like kind as Ludolf Backhuysen's Vessels upon a stormy sea (about 1690 Musee du Louvre) not upon exhibit here, and Manet's 1864 Battle of the USS 'Kearsarge' and the CS 'Alabama' (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G Johnson Collection) as coincidence. Nevertheless, Manet certainly knew and may have copied the Dutch picture, as Lloyd Dewitt notices in his exhibition catalogue essay, 'Manet and the Dutch Marine Tradition'. When he came to portray this us Civil War naval battle, fought not on file coast of Cherbourg far from North American shores, he must have remembered, consciously or unconsciously, from this Dutch painting and others like it, the use of a bird's-eye view and a wide horizon line. Novel although these have the appearanceed to Manet's contemporaries, they had sole to visit the Louvre to diocese their origins. To us, of course, Manet's phraseology is so familiar that it takes stone imagination to appreciate in what manner unusual it seemed in the 1860s

The exhibition includes sum of two units paintings by Delacroix. The great Romantic's startling Shipwreck upon the coast (1862, private collection), painted a year before Delacroix's death, displays a close sense of observation and a faculty of perception of the sea in motion just as one finds in the pictures of Manet and the Impressionists. In Delacroix's vision, it appears an immense and overwhelming force against which man and his feeble boats count for little. As the picture's date exhibits Delacroix was still alive and working when Manet was beginning his career.

However, it was Manet who discovered, or rediscovered, the high horizon line, showing the way to the Impressionist and prompting Stephane Mallarme to write of his delight at the 'rediscovery of a lengthy obliterated truth'. Courbet and, to more [i]or[/i] less extent, Whistler deemed it necessary to 'kill a wave', in Whistler's expression, in other words arrest the water's ceaseless change the better to capture the sea in paint. Manet's approach was more harmonious, more Zen He adapted his art to the sea, portraying its power and movement, rather than seeking to stop it for a jiffy This was to be part of the Impressionist search that of capturing the transient, giving a faculty of perception of the impermanence of nature. Looking at The battle of the USS 'Kearsarge' and the CS 'Alabam' you have feeling and hear the lapping waves as well as the cannon discharges It is startlingly real, plane if Manet only saw the victorious Kearsarge a month afterwards, when it passed [i]or[/i] part of to the other Boulogne, and did not witness the battle itself.

Manet was well-positioned to watch the sea. He had briefly been a sailor in his youth, during an profitless attempt, probably less than half hearted, at preparing himself for naval training. He and his family were also regular visitors to of that kind increasingly popular seaside resorts as Boulogne and Arcachon.

Many of the paintings included here display a strong Japanese influence. The USS 'Kearsarge' not upon Boulogne (1864, Metropolitan Museum, of recent origin York), a far more unruffled picture than that showing the battle itself, and Steamboats leaving Boulogne (1864 Art Institute of Chicago) have a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the fairy-tale charm of Japanese woodcut a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more dramatic is one of the exhibition's highlights, the nighttime sight of Moonlight Boulogne (1868, Musee d'Orsay, Paris), with its replete moon, partly obscured by nebulositys and its women in traditional local style of dress of long black skirts and white headdresses in the foreground, adding to the eerie atmosphere below the enveloping blue grey canopy of heaven Another gem is Summer at Arcachon (1876 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), an interior with a view looking on the outside on the sea. We diocese Manet's wife, Suzanne, a round figure with her fair hair in a bun and aligned entirely in black, gazing at the water's horizon while the couple's son Leon Leonhoff--never to the full acknowledged by Manet even after he and Suzanne made their liaison legal--lifts his head from the work he is reading and stares musingly into space, a pencil in his jaws You can feel the hazy lethargy of a of high temperature summer day when there is nothing to do and it looks that life will go upon forever in a pleasantly aimless daydream.