![Édouard Manet - The Kearsarge at Boulogne [1864]](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2925/14383747928_86d796d67c_o.jpg)
During the Civil War, a corvette of the United States Navy, the Kearsarge, attacked and sank a Confederate vessel near the French coast in June 1864. The incident received much public attention in Europe and was the subject of Manet's first painting of a current event, The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Manet seems not to have witnessed the battle at sea, but that July, when he was in Boulogne, he made a point of visiting the victorious ship at anchor. While there he executed a watercolour (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) on which this painting was probably based.
[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 81.6 x 100 cm]