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—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