Art after the horror: Impressionism

Impressionism emerged only three years after Paris endured siege, bombardment and bloody political upheaval, yet its paintings offered sunshine, leisure and women and children in green landscapes. The contrast raises an uncomfortable question: why did the movement turn away from the horror so quickly?

France spent much of the 19th century in political instability, but the crisis reached its height in 1870 and 1871. During the Franco-Prussian War, Prussian artillery struck Paris, including civilian buildings, while the city’s residents endured hunger, long queues and collapsing infrastructure. The Paris Commune then attempted a radical democratic rule by the proletariat before street fighting crushed the uprising.

Most of the artists who later became known as Impressionists had already left Paris after France’s defeat at Sedan in September 1870 and the Prussian advance. Some joined the military or the National Guard. Claude Monet’s family bought him out of military service, and he went into exile in England. Others stayed in different parts of France.

Only Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet remained caught in the besieged city. Manet never became a true Impressionist, but he served as the movement’s most important intellectual predecessor and supporter. Morisot lived with her parents on Rue Benjamin Franklin in western Paris, where her studio became temporary accommodation for the National Guard. Manet, serving as a guard on the city fortifications, visited the family from time to time.

Their letters recorded the realities of besieged Paris, from complaints about queues forming before dawn outside shops to rising death rates and the breakdown of infrastructure. Isolated, hungry and unable to work artistically, Morisot fell into a severe depression. By the time the Commune was proclaimed, however, she and Manet, like many middle- and upper-class residents, had already left the city.

What followed was not an artistic reckoning with the devastation. Impressionist painters instead depicted a peaceful present, often along the Seine west of Paris, an area that had witnessed some of the worst bloodshed. Their work turned away from the dark past. The article asks whether that silence represented a conscious refusal, and notes that visitors to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 would have recognized the recent catastrophe even without seeing it on the canvases.