Though his first-hand experience as a sailor informed his early works, Manet did not capture as lively a wake in the 1860s as he would eleven years later when returning to the sea for direct study. Manet’s earliest pieces resemble most French seascapes at the time, which were unanimated, highly polished, and clearly touched-up in the studio. For his first sea piece, the 1864 painting Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the U.S.S. “Alabama,” Manet follows the “picturesque tradition” of his day, employing smooth strokes to give the sea a flat, glasslike surface. Henri Durand-Brager’s Battle Between the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama,” produced only three weeks earlier, is believed to have motivated Manet to paint his own rendering of the battle (Wilson-Bareau and Degener 88). The two paintings employ smooth, flowing brushstrokes to create a rolling sea of dark waves barely broken by the boats. 
Though both works are meant to capture a moment of violent tension, the artists’ decision to use elongated, sinewy strokes and patches of color make the boats less active than a dense interplay of varied strokes would have done. Where the boat on the left moves through the water, the waves seem almost indistinguishable from those in the open plain of the sea. Rather than infusing the surrounding waves with sharp peaks of white or rough-edged strokes of color, Manet fails to indicate a wake at all—in contrast to his earlier claim to Toche of observing the boat’s wake. The dingy being pulled by the pilot boat is nearly camouflaged by the water around it because no strokes mark its movement. It blends into the other matte patches of color that give the painting its sense of flatness. Even the C.S.S. “Alabama” in the center does not seem to crash through the water with the speed of a pinnacle moment of conflict. Though the ship is at this moment supposed to have just been directly hit by the U.S.S. “Kearsarge”, the waves do not reflect this intensity. Across the side of the boat, the strokes are nearly horizontal, only barely lifting off the surface of the water. Little texture is evident at the back of the boat to indicate a wake, and the small spittle of water at the front of the boat seems more akin to a slow pontoon boat than a swiftly sinking vessel. By creating a glasslike sea unbroken by boats, Manet’s first sea painting allows us to see the development of his strokes in later works.
In Manet’s 1868 painting Sailing Ships at Sea, we can see how he creates a slightly more animated sea by using coarser, sandpaper-like brushwork to break the water more actively than in his 1864 pieces’ smooth, glossy strokes. 
He has evidently learned to incorporate shorter, white strokes to convey motion, for every vessel within the scene has at least one dash connected with it. However, the scene still does not fully capture a transient moment. Though the boats seem more integrated with the water than in previous pieces due to the stumpy flecks of white, they still do not appear to be instantaneously breaking the water. Most of the strokes are still long and—though less flowing than in earlier works—almost entirely horizontal. Where Manet incorporates choppier strokes, he brings a sense of swift movement from his brush to the boats, but where he drags the brush in slow, drawn-out strokes, he brings a sense of stillness. The strokes still appear as lines of paint on canvas rather than waves leaping off the canvas from the boats’ motion. Though Sailing Ships at Sea shows us slightly livelier brushwork than Manet’s first sea painting, it also provides a foundation from which to trace the artist’s increasingly animated strokes over the next two decades.
Manet, Edouard. Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama”. 1864. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Durand-Brager, Henri. Battle Between the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama”. 1864.
Union League Club of New York, New York.
Manet, Edouard. Sailing Ships at Sea. 1868. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleaveland, Ohio.