Boating is an oil painting produced in 1874 by French painter Edouard Manet.
Boating was termed as the last word in the painting by Mary Cassatt when it was shown in the Salon of 1879.
Boating was painted across the Seine at Argenteuil. Manet also spent time with other artists Monet and Renoir at the same place. In 1874, Edouard Manet during summer lived in Gennevilliers. Manet had used and adopted the lighter touch and palette in his earlier works which he learned from his impressionist younger colleagues. This time Manet adopted the broad color schemes and strong Japanese print diagonals which gave inimitable form to the canvas and several scenes of outdoor leisure. Rodolphe Leenhoff was the brother-in-law of Edouard Manet and he was thought to have posed as the sailor for the canvas but the identity of the woman is still unknown. Manet’s family home was opposite of Argenteuil at Gennevilliers on the Seine.
Claude Monet another artist and close friend of Manet had been living in Argenteuil during summers too and sometimes occasionally to Renoir. Manet then painted Monet and his wife and it was at this period of the time when he came near to adopting the impressionist technique of working in the open air. This technique uses short and rapid brushstrokes which helped Manet to adopt a much higher value to this work than compared to other earlier work.
The painting was much larger than the portable canvases his other colleagues, Monet and Renoir were using at that period. There was none other work that characterized impressionist works as this kind of work needs much careful earlier planning and also should be closest to the spirit of Japanese prints. The dimensions of the canvas were 97.2cm x 130.2 cm or 38.25 in x 51.25 in. In 1879, the work was shown at the Salon, five years after the work was completed but here its affinities to Impressionism were noticed by several critics.
The work can be viewed at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.