Stop and Look – Argenteuil by Édouard Manet (1874)
Two middle-class holiday-makers are sitting in a boat, enjoying a sunny day out on the Seine, not far from Paris. Despite the boats and the water, this is really a suburban scene, and the tall smoking chimneys in the background assure us we’re not far from a big town.
We feel at once that we are being introduced to a thoroughly suburban couple, in the relaxed attire of people who have escaped from the formalities of their urban lives to a weekend resort. The title of the picture, the name of that resort, tells us that it is a representation of vacation time. This is the nineteenth-century equivalent of the holiday snap, intimate, unselfconscious, the characters thoroughly at ease.
The young man here is Manet’s brother-in-law, Rudophe Leenhoff, replacing the original model who was none other than Manet’s friend and fellow artist Claude Monet, who lived at Argenteuil. Rudolphe seems to be in an intimate relationship with the young woman whose parasol he is nonchalantly holding in what might be interpreted as a provocative position.
We don’t know who the young lady is, and it’s been assumed that she is just a hired model, or a riverside fille de joie. I would prefer to imagine that she is more likely a friend of Leenhoff’s and that Manet observed the pair like this because they were both good friends of his, too. At any rate, it is here at Argenteuil that Manet pays homage to the new style of painting that Monet had recently introduced, the “Impressionism” that threw down so momentous a gauntlet to the Academics of the Paris Salon.
The picture is a challenge in more ways than one. It marks a break from the style of Manet’s earlier exhibited works, which, though highly innovative in subject matter, had been executed with all the authority, grand scale, solemn colouring and refined draughtsmanship of the Old Masters. Here, he takes a leaf out of Monet’s Impressionist book and paints with a broad, fresh touch, in a truly summery gamut of bright colours.
The picture as a whole announces a departure from the urban, the formal, and the historically aware: there are few reminders of the great Spanish masters, Velazquez and Goya, whom Manet had taken as models in his first revolutionary works, the Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.
But the academicians might have noticed and appreciated the self-conscious though subtle architecture of the composition: the firm verticals defining and punctuating the space, the horizontality of that parasol, even the stripes on the couple’s clothes echoing the verticals and horizontals of the picture-frame.
Even though it proclaimed the aesthetic of the Impressionists, it’s not entirely surprising that the picture was accepted for the Salon in 1875.
Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.