Paris in Ruins, by Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee, offers a gripping account of summer 1870 to spring 1871 - famously dubbed the “Terrible Year” by Victor Hugo - when Paris and its people were besieged and starved, enduring bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris. In vivid prose, Smee shows that it was against this backdrop of tumult that the Impressionist movement was born.

Smee tells the story through the eyes of great figures of Impressionism, including Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas, who were trapped in Paris during the siege and deeply enmeshed in its politics. Incisive and absorbing, Paris in Ruins reveals how artistic genius can emerge from darkness and catastrophe.

Smee is an 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 written for numerous publications, including theDaily Telegraph, Guardian, and Financial Times.