Paris In Ruins: How A Brutal Conflict Informed the Birth of Impressionism

2025 Germaine Brée Lecture: Sebastian Smee Art critic, The Washington Post   Sebastian Smee will speak about how Impressionism, a movement which most of us rightly associate with light and color and beauty, actually came out of a dark and traumatic period in the history of France—and of Paris in particular. He will tell the story of how a group of maverick artists were caught up in the political turmoil of the 1860s and 70s, and how three of the group’s leading painters, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, found themselves trapped in Paris in 1870 and ’71, when the French capital was besieged by German-speaking troops and its inhabitants reduced to starvation. He’ll explain how France’s political divisions were sharpened in the wake of the siege, leading into an insurrection in Paris and a violent civil war—the Paris Commune and Bloody Week—and he’ll talk about the various ways in which the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 was connected to all this political tumult. Finally, he’ll speak about how these events may have affected the art the Impressionists made—both the subjects to which they were attracted and the manner in which they painted. What, he will ask, is the nature of the relationship between political events and the cultural sphere? How do these connections appear in art, both directly and indirectly?  

Sebastian Smee is an art critic for The Washington Post and the author of Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011 while at The Boston Globe and taught non-fiction writing at Wellesley College from 2010–2022. He has written for newspapers and magazines in the U.K., Australia and the U.S., among them The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Spectator, The Australian, The Monthly, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was awarded the Rabkin Prize for art journalism in 2018 and was a MacDowell Fellow in 2021. He wrote The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (2016) and Net Loss: The Inner Life in the Digital Age (2018). He has written or contributed essays to seven books on Lucian Freud and one on Mark Bradford. His books have been shortlisted for the General History Prize NSW History Awards (2025), the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, non-fiction (2017), and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, non-fiction (2017) and was a finalist in the Walkley Book Award (2016).

  This event is sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities’ Germaine Brée Lecture Fund.