The work was acquired by the National Gallery in 1936 (on deposit by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung [de]), where it was placed on display in Room 5.

The vertical composition is divided, fragmented or faceted into series of non-Euclidean spherical arcs, hyperbolic triangles, rectangles, squares, planes or surfaces delineated by contrasting form.

These photographic motion studies particularly interested artists that would later form groups known as the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne and Section d'Or, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp.

A predecessor to cinematography and moving film, chronophotography involved a series or succession of different images, originally created and used for the scientific study of movement.

[5] Though not the first painting by Metzinger to employ the concept of multiple perspective—three years had passed since he first propounded the idea in Note sur la peinture,[6] published in 1910—En Canot arguably exemplifies such pictorial processes, while still maintaining elements of recognizable form (the number 3, perhaps suggestive of a regatta, the woman, the umbrella, the boats); the extreme activity of geometric faceting visible in En Canot is not pushed to the point that any understandable link between physicality or naturalness is lost to the viewer.

[2][7] On the opening day of the 1913 Salon d'Automne, art critic Louis Paillard, in a review published in Le Petit Journal, writes of Metzinger's entry: You can recognize without difficulty ... that Metzinger sat a woman with an umbrella in a boat, a woman with her face cut into sections that we could reassemble easily enough, and which is not of unpleasant colors.

If one is sensitive to the beauty of the subject [matière], the variety of forms, to the flexibility [souplesse] of the lines, to the fantasy of the composition, one can not look with indifference at this delicious canvas.

However, Metzinger's painting is portrayed in a variety of black and white photographs shot between 1914 and 1930, and appears in a film recorded at the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition.

][16][17] The golden proportion, upon which En Canot may have been based, represented simultaneously a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in the arts.

[15] The year 1913 saw the Cubist movement continuing to evolve, wrote Albert Gleizes: The changes it had already undergone since the Indépendants of 1911 could leave people in no doubt as to its nature.

Its enemies could, eventually, have forgiven it if only it had passed away, like a fashion; but they became even more violent when they realised that it was destined to live a life that would be longer than that of those painters who had been the first to assume the responsibility for it.

[18] At the 1913 Salon des Indépendants could be seen a very large work of Jean Metzinger's - L'Oiseau Bleu; L'Equipe de Cardiff from Robert Delaunay; two important canvasses from Léger; still lifes and L'Homme au Café from Juan Gris; enthusiastic new work from La Fresnaye and from Marcoussis, and from others again; and finally, from myself, Les Joueurs de Football.

[18][19]En Canot was acquired at the Galerie Der Sturm in 1916 by the artist Georg Muche, whose father was a naïve painter and art collector known as Felix Muche-Ramholz.

Paintings were hung crowded together, some with no frames, alongside racist slogans denigrating the artists for "insulting German womanhood" and revealing "sick minds."

[24][25] Metzinger's Im Boot along with works by Johannes Molzahn and Kurt Schwitters were reproduced in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art catalogue.

A text accompanying the works singles out Molzahn, Metzinger and Schwitters, summarizing the essence of the entire exhibition:[26][27][28][29] Entartete-Kunst, Group 9: This section can only be entitled Sheer insanity.

It occupies the largest room in the exhibition, and contains a cross section of the abortions produced by all the isms thought up, promoted, and peddled over the years by Flechtheim, Wollheim, and their cohorts.

Nazi officers took many for their private use: for example, Hermann Göring took fourteen valuable pieces, including works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.

[7] En Canot is listed on the Lost Art Internet Database with the title "Im Boot", inventory number: Museum A II 698; EK 16056.