Overview

From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the ""Terrible Year"" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans--then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. In stirring and exceptionally vivid prose, Sebastian Smee tells the story of those dramatic days through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism. �douard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Others, including Pierre-August Renoir, joined regiments outside of the capital, while Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro fled the country just in time. In the aftermath, these artists developed a newfound sense of the fragility of life. That feeling for transience--reflected in Impressionism's emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and the impermanence of all things--became the movement's great contribution to the history of art. Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins captures the shifting passions and politics of the art world, revealing how the siege and the chaos of the Commune had a profound impact on modern art, and how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

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Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry. Formerly the chief art critic at the Boston Globe and national art critic for the Australian, he has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, and the Independent, among other publications. He lives in Boston. British-born Julian Elfer is an award-winning New York City-based actor and audiobook narrator with over fifty titles to his credit. Recently hailed by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for his lead performance in the Mint a Theatre Company's A Day by the Sea, Julian brings a unique facility for characterization in fiction and an empathy for the personalities and events of the past.

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