Pearson's Looking Through the Canvas with Henry Sayre on Manet’s Battle of the “Kearsarge” and “Alabama”
Join author Henry Sayre in our Looking Through the Canvas webisode series where he will discuss the politics underlying Édouard Manet’s The Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” painted in a matter of weeks after, on Sunday, June 19, the U.S.S. Kearsarge engaged the Confederate sloop Alabama in international waters just off Cherbourg, France in the English Channel and sank her in a battle that lasted some 70 minutes. Manet’s first painting to directly address current events, it encapsulates French attitudes toward the American Civil War. Its centrality to the painter’s own political leanings are perhaps best illustrated by the fact that eight years later, after France had been defeated by Germany and radical Paris had fallen to more conservative French forces, in what itself amounted to a Civil War, it would be Manet’s sole entry to the Salon of 1872.
Henry M. Sayre, Professor of Art History, Oregon State University
Join author Henry Sayre in our Looking Through the Canvas webisode series where he will discuss the politics underlying Édouard Manet’s The Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” painted in a matter of weeks after, on Sunday, June 19, the U.S.S. Kearsarge engaged the Confederate sloop Alabama in international waters just off Cherbourg, France in the English Channel and sank her in a battle that lasted some 70 minutes. Manet’s first painting to directly address current events, it encapsulates French attitudes toward the American Civil War. Its centrality to the painter’s own political leanings are perhaps best illustrated by the fact that eight years later, after France had been defeated by Germany and radical Paris had fallen to more conservative French forces, in what itself amounted to a Civil War, it would be Manet’s sole entry to the Salon of 1872.
About the speaker
Henry M. Sayre, Professor of Art History, Oregon State University
Henry M. Sayre is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Oregon State University, Cascades Campus in Bend, Oregon. He is producer and creator of the 10-part television series A World of Art: Works in Progress, which aired on PBS in the fall of 1997; and author of 7 books, including The Humanities; Writing About Art; The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams; The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970; and an art history book for children, Cave Paintings to Picasso.