Two warships trade fire on a choppy gray-green sea, their guns wrapped in thick clouds of smoke. At the center, the Confederate raider Alabama sinks by her stern, while the Union ship Kearsarge is mostly hidden in the smoke at the left. In the foreground a small sailing boat with a French flag crosses the waves, and tiny figures struggle in the water. The battle took place off Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art calls this Manet's first known seascape and an imaginative depiction: clouds of smoke rise from a direct hit to the Alabama's engines by the Kearsarge. Édouard Manet showed it in July 1864 in the window of Alfred Cadart's print shop in Paris, which the museum says demonstrates his quick response to a sensational and recent news event. The picture came to Philadelphia with the John G. Johnson Collection in 1917.

It is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.