 It seems incredible that Manet should have produced at least three magnificent sea-pieces in 1864. Before that year we have absolutely no knowledge of where Manet spent his summer vacations; and most importantly, no indication that he had ever tried to paint the sea, a beach, or a harbour. In 1924 Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote in his monograph about Manet:
"His sea-pieces are at once the most splendid, the most real and the most living ever painted in the nineteenth century. No one has rendered better than he the jade green, the ocean skies, the black rigging of ships, the smoke of a passenger steamer, or a port or a beach. His painting has not the marmoreal opacity, the congealed look of Gustave Courbet's, who pictorially immobilizes what is essentially fugitive."
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