A dark, black-hulled steamship, the Kearsarge, rides at anchor on the horizon, small beside the foreground, where a fishing boat with a big brown sail heels over in a choppy green sea. Little white sailboats dot the water in between, and a few waves break in foam at the lower left. In June 1864 the U.S.S. Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama off Cherbourg.

Édouard Manet did not see the battle, which he painted from newspaper reports, but the Metropolitan Museum says this picture was prompted by his later visit to the victorious ship at anchor near Boulogne. The Philadelphia Museum of Art says he went on to see and paint the ship from life; the Met says only that the visit prompted the picture. Manet's companion canvas of the battle itself was in a Paris print-shop window by July 1864 and is now in Philadelphia. The Met acquired this picture in 1999, through a gift of Peter H.

B. Frelinghuysen and purchase funds. It is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.