Edouard Manet's Monet working on his boat

Edouard Manet's Monet working on his boat (Frontpage) (more on Edourd Manet) (Thumbnail_Index)

Monet working on his boat, Argenteuil Edouard Manet -- French Painter 1874 Neue Pinakothek, Munich Oil 82.5 x 100.5 cm (32 1/2 x 39 1/2) Jpeg: local source

Claude Monet loves water, and it is his especial gift to protray its mobility and transparency, be it sea or river, grey and monotonous, coloured by the sky. I have never seen a boat poised more lightly on the water than in his pictures, or vailed more mobile and light than his moving atmosphere. It is in truth a marvel.
(Stephane Mallarme, Art Monthly Review, "The Impressionists and Edourd Manet", September, 1876)

As the Impressionist movement was talking off, Manet was the elder, but it would be Claude Monet that dropped the practice (which was the norm at the time) to make sketches in nature and then take them back to the studio to reconstruct the final painting on the easel. Monet felt, if you were going to try and capture the fleeting nature of light on objects, you had better paint -- not from memory -- but from nature itself; and that's what he did.

Edouard Manet, in this painting, is giving tribute to Claude for getting him and his contemporaries out of the studio.

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