Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism

Sebastian Smee is a longtime art critic for many newspapers. Smee graduated from the University of Sydney with a Fine Arts degree in 1994. He has contributed to The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, and currently writes for The Washington Post. Smee was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 while at the Boston Globe “for his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing works to life with love and appreciation” (“2011 Pulitzer Prizes.” The Pulitzer Prizes).

Smee has written several books about art for popular audiences, including Side by Side: Picasso v Matisse (2002) and The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (2016). Smee notes in his Acknowledgements that Paris in Ruins “grew indirectly out of the chapter on Manet and Degas in my 2016 book” (339). Like his other books about art and art history, Paris in Ruins examines both the artist’s biography and their work. The text displays Smee’s approach to writing about art and art history, such as when he describes the experience of looking at Édouard Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot:

Manet painted each of them swiftly, and when you look at them, they feel swift, like telling glances.