In December 1848, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Edouard Manet left France on a merchant vessel sailing to Rio de Janeiro and back; the voyage lasted almost four months. Earlier that year, he had failed the entrance examination for naval officers’ school and the trip was a kind of remedial course, designed to prepare unsuccessful young applicants to the French Naval Academy for a second—final—try at the exam. Manet’s letters home suggest that he loved being at sea, but, despite the intensive on-board cramming, he failed the exam again, definitively ending his chance of a naval career, no doubt to his haute bourgeoise family’s despair. We know the rest.

Or do we? Manet was so inventive, so daring, so restless a painter that there always seems something new to discover about him. Over the past few years, our ideas have been enlarged by exhibitions focusing—narrowly—on his still lifes and—broadly
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