Sea changes.

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 onboard 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--on his complex conversation with the tradition of Spanish painting. Another well-conceived and well-realized show, "Manet and the Sea"--which originated at the Art Institute of Chicago and is now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art--further enriches our sense of this modern giant's achievement by concentrating on the modest but remarkably significant 10 percent of his oeuvre dealing with marine motifs. (1) It's a fascinating exhibition that assembles an often surprising selection of works, some of them rarely seen, all of them corresponding to the broadest possible interpretation of the theme--not only images of harbors, beaches, and boats, but also views of the sea through the window, the tidal mouths of rivers (but not, the curators tell us, upstream scenes), and the canals of Venice, presumably because of the salinity of the water. Including Venice is not too much of a stretch, especially since it justifies the presence of a terrific picture; the presence of that celebrated still life of a fish from the Art Institute of Chicago is harder to explain. A handful of fine preparatory studies and a delicious little notebook full of on-the-spot, rapid watercolors season the mix. Viewers may turn the pages of the notebook--virtually, at least--through an interactive video program in a nearby gallery.

In the simplest terms, "Manet and the Sea" can be savored simply as a wonderful group of Manets. From a more scholarly point of view, it can be enjoyed as an opportunity to consider together related pictures that are now in widely separated collections. The show centers on the Philadelphia Museum of Art's great treasure, The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama" (1864). This tour de force of malachite green water and roiling gray smoke, punctuated by knife-edged black hulls, was the thirty-two-year-old Manet's first seascape, inspired by newspaper accounts and images of a celebrated Civil War naval battle, which took place, improbably, in the Channel. (Something to do with blockades.) In Philadelphia, the picture is installed where we can easily compare it to the Metropolitan Museum's more tranquil but equally tough image of the sleek black "Kearsarge" at rest, played off of the swelling curves of a brown-sailed fishing boat. Painted the same year as the imagined battle scene, after Manet saw the victorious steamship anchored off Boulogne, the Met's picture is like a distorted mirror image of the Philadelphia painting. The two share a sharply angled view of the nominal "subject" of the picture, a composition notably at odds with traditional marine paintings, but each has a highly distinctive mood and temperature, the result of subtle differences in color, deployment of shapes, and orchestration of densities. Nearby, the Art Institute of Chicago's coloristically and compositionally related Steamboat Leaving Boulogne, also painted in 1864, announces still other possibilities; a near-abstraction of relentlessly flat planes of water and sky--blue against pale gray--a scattering of bold, sooty gray arcs of silhouetted sails, and a scribble of smoke, it seems to make Milton Avery's late work inevitable.

The show includes the Philadelphia Museum's peculiar canvas The Steamboat, Seascape with Porpoises (1868), almost identical in palette to the "Kearsarge" pictures, but oddly awkward in composition. The relationship of the edge of the picture to the horizontal yards of the square-rigged sailing ship is both uncomfortable and infelicitous. And then there is that strange subtext implied by the combination of the school of porpoises, an image with idyllic, classical overtones, with the "traditional" sailboats and a modern steamship spewing smoke. Smaller, related pictures, including some notebook drawings and watercolors, from other far-flung sources, help us to track Manet's probing of the permutations of the sea as a motif, a theme both new to him and evidently provocative.

Similar groupings document Manet's explorations of seaside and seascape motifs during the two decades after he painted the "Kearsarge" pictures--born in 1832, he died, at fifty-one, in 1883. The sequence allows, even encourages, us to approach the show as an exploration of the painter's evolution, yet "Manet and the Sea" has broader ambitions. It not only examines Manet's originality and audacity as a painter of seascapes, but also widens the inquiry, by connecting his sea paintings to those of his colleagues and near-contemporaries. Manet is what the curators call "the backbone" of the show; his work is flanked by a series of miniature monographic exhibitions of sea pictures by Gustave Courbet, James A. M. Whistler, Eugene Boudin, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The installation's sightlines cross-reference thematically related pictures, forcing us to ruminate on friendships, aesthetic connections, and the artists' general awareness of each other's work, with interesting effect. Unlikely as the friendship between Courbet and Whistler may seem, for example, given the differences in what we know of their temperaments and the obvious differences in their work, the proximity of an atypically translucent, close-valued Courbet of waterspouts to a group of exquisitely subtle Whistler seascapes not only reminds us that the two painted together at the beach, but also makes it seem possible that they had something useful and of mutual benefit to talk about.

All of this is set in context by a capsule history of influential marine painting--a handful of Dutch seascapes of the seventeenth century and some "official" nineteenth-century French paintings of sea battles--defining the conventions for the genre before Manet and his colleagues began to disrupt them and, ultimately, make them irrelevant. In the Dutch paintings, ships are emblems of profitable commerce, while in the French pictures heroic acts are the subject. In both, the sea is a neutral backdrop; it seems nearly coincidental that whatever was depicted occurred in the presence of seawater. A couple of small but muscular canvases by Eugene Delacroix signal the beginning of what it is almost irresistible not to call a sea change: the expression of heightened sensibility that we call "Romanticism." In Delacroix's powerful pictures, neither the pale tossing surf in a painting of a shipwreck nor the turbulent green waves of a stormy Sea of Galilee can be relegated to the role of background. Agitated, threatening, unstable water becomes a mirror of emotion, an equivalent for human feeling and drama. It was a fresh and arresting idea, early on, although by the mid-nineteenth century, it, too, had become a convention of marine views. Yet the Romantic shift of emphasis to the sea itself, as metaphor, prepared the way for Manet and his colleagues to turn their attention on the sea as spectacle--to treat expanses of water and the sea coast as visual phenomena, subjects of contemplation, and triggers for meditation.

How stimulating Manet himself found the most minimal, elegant contrasts of sails, boats, and the plane of the sea is eloquently demonstrated by a trio of astonishing small pictures that he painted between 1868 and 1873. Each distills, in a slightly different way, the cool, moist air and diffused light of overcast days on the Northern coasts of France into pure painting. The big divisions of beach, water, and sky are accounted for with broad washes of translucent gray, sometimes flushed with ochre, sometimes tinged with green. Sails and hulls become schematic shapes, loosely disposed across a surface that becomes a metaphor for the unstable surface of the sea. Details of masts and rigging are sometimes itemized with fluent drawing, reminding us of the specialized knowledge Manet acquired, albeit imperfectly, on that training voyage. Still, pictorial imperatives could make him jettison mere accuracy, without regret; witness a little jewel from the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, in which clouds, waves, wind, and rigging alike are reduced to delicate, nervous brushstrokes. Or another little masterpiece, from a private collection, that sets a pair of dark sails and a single light sail against a minimally inflected, washy ground with a bare hint of horizon. Add two strokes for hulls. Next stop, abstraction.

That the most apparently uneventful aspects of the seashore were powerful stimuli for pictorial invention is also visible, throughout the show, in stripped down, arresting paintings by Manet's colleagues--a dazzling 1869 Courbet of a terrifying black-green wave under a swirling purple-brown sky or a glittering 1864 Monet of Honfleur, all flecked clouds and dancing wavelets, to name only two examples. Pictures such as these make it tempting to assume that the elemental divisions of sea and sky, along with the spatial dislocations of the shapes of sails, were essential to modernist painting's gradual elimination of everything not intrinsic to the discipline, including illusionism and narrative, as Clement Greenberg formulated it. But "modernist painting" is not interchangeable with "abstract painting," and timeless, even prescient, as some of Manet's and his colleagues' most simplified sea pictures are, there are other, equally compelling works in the show that remind us that modernism was not only a question of formal innovations. (Even in formal terms, it is clear that for Manet and his near-contemporaries, multiplicity, could be as effective a spur as extreme simplicity in challenging conventions; witness the Impressionists' packed boulevard scenes or the landscape images that can seem to anticipate all-over abstraction.)

Manet himself was a sophisticated, worldly Parisian, not only the quintessential "painter of modern life," but an active participant in it. In his day, the seaside, newly accessible by railway, was becoming a new destination for leisure-seekers and those experimenting with the new-fangled idea of sea-bathing for curative purposes. New resorts were constructed; exclusive beach clubs--societes des bains--were formed. That Manet, too, went to the seaside for family vacations is documented by small, charming pictures cobbled together from notebook studies of people like himself and his family members strolling on the beach. They are both intensely evocative of a particular moment in their sharply observed details of dress and posture, and radical in their spatial syncopations. A curious little painting of women in bathing suits on the beach, one reclining, one revealing a bit of thigh as she wrings out the hem of her daringly short skirt, is like an unsentimental, formally rigorous September Morn. An economically composed painting of Manet's wife and brother seated at the water's edge, a paradoxical miracle of terse abstract construction and telling, fiercely reduced detail, bears witness to the painter's ventures out of the studio to work en plein air; grains of sand embedded in the paint attest to a persistent wind. (So do Suzanne Manet's tightly tied veil and securely anchored hat.)

That Manet's colleagues also painted at the beach on family holidays is documented by a group of light-struck, apparently improvisational pictures by his sister-in-law, Berthe Morisot, painted on the Isle of Wight. The point is most clearly reinforced, however, by a delightful 1870 Monet of his wife, seated on the beach, sheltering under a parasol; painted during the artist's honeymoon in Trouville, the little picture also bears witness to Monet's faultless eye for tone, his ability to evoke specific qualities of light with non-literal color, and his marvelous touch. Like Manet's picture of his wife at the beach, the Monet was painted en plein air; there is visible sand in the surface of this painting, too. (Manet's relationship to the whiz-kid Monet is a kind of subtext of the show, which makes it clear how much the younger artist learned from the older; Manet apparently resented it at first, although the two men later became friends, linked perhaps by their common desire to "make it modern.")

Modernity is the subject, too, of Manet's crowded harbor scenes, paeans to up-to-date transport, announced as energetic flicks of the brush. The most unforgettable though, may be his least mechanized: a superb, deadpan, extraordinarily complex "portrait" of the twin jetties at Boulogne. Pilings and railings are translated into repetitive strokes that stretch edge to edge across the canvas, making us read broad bands of green and gray, above and below, as sea and sky. The mast of a sailboat slipping between the jetties challenges these insistent horizontals, its rapid vertical drawing and delicately traced rigging at once carving out space between the parallel, overlapped jetties and marking the surface of the canvas; the loosely rendered sails of three boats strengthen the argument.

The last years of Manet's too-brief career are accounted for by an unfinished but no less powerful canvas, probably intended for the Salon of 1881, and a study for it. Inspired, like the first "Kearsarge" painting, by newspaper accounts, both the small and large versions of The Escape of Rochefort (both 1880-1881, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and Kunsthaus Zurich, respectively) imaginatively envision the escape of a well-known political prisoner from New Caledonia. Both the large, rough-hewn canvas and the smaller study reprise the tipped expanse of blue-green and the high horizon of Manet's first sea pictures, but we are brought much closer, not only to the ostensible subjects--the escaping men in their rowboat--but also to the surface of the water itself. Especially in the unfinished large painting, Rochefort and his fellow escapees are rendered fairly schematically. The water, however, is an explosion of ferocious, emphatic brushstrokes, all wrist, arm, and excitement about how pigment feels under the hand.

"Manet and the Sea" is obviously an exhibition rooted in sound, exhaustive art historical research, but it is also a show driven by visual connections and by the sheer pleasure of bringing together pictures that ravish the eye at the same time that they stimulate the intellect. It reminds us of how artists really function: that particular desiderata are common to like-minded painters at particular times, that even the most assured, self-sufficient artists pay attention to what their colleagues are doing, and more. The installation underscores these ideas by providing unexpected long views, although how well this will work when the galleries are crowded with visitors attracted by the promise of yet another Impressionist show is another matter. The handsome catalogue's essays, by a variety of experts on the period including the exhibition's co-curator, the Manet scholar Juliet Wilson-Bareau, provide a great deal of fascinating, usually readable information. Wilson-Bareau's prose is, to put it delicately, plodding, but the depth of her knowledge of Manet is astonishing and she is generous in sharing illuminating details. Together, "Manet and the Sea" and its interesting catalogue shed new light on this apparently inexhaustible subject. I feel certain there is more to come. We can look forward to "Manet and What?" next.

(1) "Manet and the Sea" opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on February 15 and remains on view through May 31, 2004. The exhibition was previously on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from October 20, 2003 to January 19, 2004.