The ship's deck

This painting of the deck of a ship at sea is an early work by an artist who from his own time onward has been synonymous with modernism. Édouard Manet is generally remembered as a painter of modern urban life, whose major images reflect the social and psychological ambiguities of his time. This work, which stands at the beginning of Manet’s career, belongs to a minor theme in his oeuvre, but one to which he returned many times throughout his life: the theme of the sea and ships. In most of Manet’s other paintings of this subject matter, it is the sea that occupies most of the canvas, but the interest of The ship’s deck is in the ship itself.