Boating

A man in a straw boater grips the tiller of a sailboat, filling the foreground, a woman in white beside him, the whole canvas flooded with the flat, brilliant blue of sunlit water that rises to the very top edge. Manet painted Boating at Argenteuil alongside Monet, adopting the Impressionists' bright palette and cropped, snapshot framing. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, it is his most fully Impressionist work - modern leisure on the Seine seized with bold simplicity, the daring expanse of pure blue and the casual, off-center poses thoroughly of their fresh new moment.