The blue goes all the way up. There is no far bank, no sky and no horizon line — the river fills the canvas like a flat backdrop. The boat is cut off by the frame at the right, the sail is cut off at the top, and the man's head very nearly touches the top edge.
The summer at Gennevilliers
Manet spent the summer of 1874 at Gennevilliers, where his family owned land, directly across the Seine from Argenteuil. Monet was living at Argenteuil, Renoir came out to paint there as well, and that short stretch of river is where a surprising amount of the decade got painted.
The man at the tiller, in the straw hat and the white shirt, is thought to be Rodolphe Leenhoff, Manet's brother-in-law. Nobody has ever worked out who the woman is. The canvas is 97 centimetres by 130, which is a large picture of two people doing very little on a Sunday, and the size is part of the argument: that scale was for history, battle and myth, not for an afternoon out on a boat.
What he left out
Nearly everything a viewer used for bearings has been removed. No horizon, so there is no distance. No sky, so there is no weather. No bank, so there is no telling how far out they are. The water is laid in as one flat blue with the ripples drawn on top rather than built up.
The whole thing behaves like a photograph taken a second too early, or like a Japanese print, where a diagonal is allowed to run off the edge and an empty area is allowed to stay empty. Both were being studied hard in Paris that year. It did not go on a public wall until the Salon of 1879, five years after it was painted, by which point the cropping looked less like a mistake and more like a method.
The American who insisted
Mary Cassatt called it the last word in painting. She was an American painter living in Paris with an exceptional eye and a gift for persuading people, and she spent years telling wealthy friends at home what to buy — which is a large part of why so much French nineteenth-century painting hangs in the United States today.
Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer took her advice, this picture included. It reached the Metropolitan Museum in 1929 with the Havemeyer bequest and has been in New York since. Manet himself died in 1883, four years after the Salon finally let it on a wall, with no idea that the flat blue river would end up on another continent. A picture with no horizon, bought on the word of a painter who liked it for exactly the reasons the Salon had hesitated over.
He took out the horizon, the sky and the far bank. What is left is a river with nothing above it but more river.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.