EDOUARD MANET DOCUMENTS A MAJOR BATTLE
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August/September 2003
Volume54Issue4
As a teenager in the 184Os, Edouard Manet wanted to become a painter. When his father wouldn’t let him, he applied to a naval college. Failing to get in, he went to sea for a year. Then he applied to the college again and was turned down once more. Only then did his father let him become an artist. Thus it is no wonder that in 1864, when the Union and Confederate ships Kearsarge and Alabama fought off the coast of France, the former sinking the latter, Manet hurried from Paris to Boulogne to see the victor at anchor. The result, a year after he painted Olympia and Déjeuner sur L’Herbe , was The “Kearsarge” at Boulogne . The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City (