Édouard Manet
By the summer of 1874, Édouard Manet had spent years as the reluctant godfather of a movement to which he didn't quite belong. The Impressionists worshiped him; he kept his distance, still committed to dark grounds, black paint, and the Salon's approval. Then he went to stay with Claude Monet in Argenteuil ... and something in him loosened.
The result is one of Manet's most sun-drenched, outdoor-painted canvases. He sets up not far from where Monet himself was working that same summer (the two even painted alongside each other, along with Renoir, in a kind of impromptu plein-air summit). Camille Monet and her young son Jean stand on the riverbank, the water behind them scattered with light and rippling brushwork clearly borrowed from Monet's own vocabulary. Across the river, laundry barges line the opposite bank—the everyday, unglamorous machinery of a town that Impressionism was busy turning into subject matter worthy of serious art.
But Manet never fully surrenders his own instincts. The water sparkles in loose, Impressionist strokes, yet the figures themselves are built with his characteristic density—thick, confident paint and those signature blacks that Monet and Renoir had mostly abandoned.
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