A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk which I entitled “The US Civil War in Global Perspective.” My host was a group called the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, and they’re a delightful bunch of people who are really interested in history generally, and the Civil War in particular.
I started out my presentation with a bit of a twist. Given the focus, I showed them a painting by famed proto-impressionist Édouard Manet entitled The Kearsarge at Boulogne from 1864. The painting of a US warship at a French port was no mere seascape. In this painting, I told them, one could see hints of how the world watched the American Civil War. Why would a French painter specifically make it his topic?
The Kearsarge was a sloop of the U.S. Navy launched in September 1861 when the war was just a few months along. She sailed immediately for European waters to hunt down Confederate commerce raiders. In 1864 she finally caught up with the one she was most looking for, and Manet painted a picture he called The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama. In it, he tried to capture some of the dramatic action of a battle at sea. The battle happened on June 19, 1864 in the English Channel within sight of the port of Cherbourg.
Manet wasn’t among the crowd that day who watched the Kearsarge send the Alabama to the bottom, but he read numerous press accounts and started composing his canvas. Less than a month after he started the painting, it was on display at a gallery in Paris. Today it’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The painting I used to kick off my talk is at the Met in New York. That’s why I chose it to include. Boulogne is another French port on the English Channel, and it was to there that the Kearsarge went after the shootout.
Manet painted several other coastal and sea scenes in and around Boulogne but in none of them are current events and the news of the world so entwined. After all, this was in the years before news photography. These two paintings were Manet’s attempts to use the stylistic forms of an emerging modernism to capture and relate contemporary events and sensations.
The public interest in the war represented by Manet’s paintings was significant. The British and the French, especially, were interested in the war for both economic and strategic reasons. Britain imported 75% of its cotton from the U.S., and France 90%. So even when you don’t expect it, art can widen the way we look at history.
