How a doomed love affair got impressionism going

Paris in Ruins, by Sebastian Smee, claims that a grand dalliance helped shape the movement – but with little evidence to prove it happened

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The triumph of a trend commonly labelled “Impressionism” was a pivotal moment in the history of art. Precisely what the term implies can be debated, but as Sebastian Smee suggests in his vigorous and enjoyable book, it can broadly be ascribed to the revolt against rule-bound academic painting in Paris during the 1870s, led by a loosely connected band of young French artists including Claude Monet and Jean Renoir who freely explored “not only the flux and transience of light, but the profound fragility of life itself”, drawing their subject-matter from the world immediately visible around them. 
Paris in Ruins offers a broad perspective on this phenomenon, unfurling the tumultuous sequence of external tragedies that unravelled while it evolved. In 1870, Napoleon III’s authoritarian Second Empire collapsed, as France suffered an unexpected defeat in the Franco-Prussian War that led to the Prussians besieging Paris for four months. After a shameful surrender, Left-wing elements briefly hijacked the capital and established a breakaway régime known as the Commune. This insurrection was brutally crushed by conservative forces, at the cost of countless lives and widespread destruction. A decade of painful national remorse ensued before a degree of stability consolidated in the forms of the Third Republic.
Through this maelstrom, Smee, a Pulitzer-winning art critic, traces the stories of several engaging personalities: Gustave Courbet, the scandalous realist painter naively committed to revolution; Nadar, the eccentric photographer and balloonist; two great might-have-been among the artists, Frédéric Bazille and Henri Regnault, both killed young in battle; as well as less endearing political movers and shakers such as Léon Gambetta and Adolphe Thiers.
At the heart of Smee’s narrative, however, is the relationship between two painters, Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. They first met in the Louvre in 1868, but when Smee writes that “we don’t know what they spoke about”, he admits to a basic problem that persists: there simply isn’t much for posterity to go on. Smee’s belief that their dialogue developed into a grand if unconsummated love affair looks like a biographer’s wishful thinking, undermined by the absence of any solid evidence to that effect – though he is not alone: others have drawn the same conclusion. 
The facts are these: Morisot lived respectably in the bosom of her haut-bourgeois family, and eventually married Manet’s brother, while Manet himself was companionably married and generally cautious in his dealings with women. (He once expressed regret that Berthe, charming though she was, wasn’t a man.) What Manet’s several paintings of Morisot communicate is a complex psyche rather than erotic allure, and their correspondence certainly gives evidence of a warm professional friendship, rooted in commitment to their calling – “artists often converse with another through paint”, as Smee reminds us. But to assume that anything more went on, either in the head or on a bed, is supposition, even titillation.
Morisot struggled against nervous illness and the restrictions imposed on her sex, defiantly declaring that “work is the sole purpose of my existence” but often faltering. Smee is clearly on side, calling her “the most ground-breaking female artist of the 19th century” – not much competition for that accolade, alas – as he explores her achievement, much of it intimately domestic or freshly outdoor (“en plein air”) in setting and rendered in watercolour and pastel as well as oils. Perhaps her most famous painting is The Cradle, a sensitive depiction of her beloved sister Edma keeping watch over her baby with “exhaustion, even a kind of melancholy”. 
Morisot’s style, gentle and unemphatic, is unmistakably Impressionist; Manet, on the other hand, can’t be easily pigeonholed. Following his friend Charles Baudelaire’s rallying cry for art to depict realities of modern life, he drew on the dramatic compositions and vibrant colours of Goya and Velazquez to create images and portraits of richly ambiguous implication that often look self-consciously staged – notoriously so, in the teasing Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in which two fully clothed males chattily picnic alongside a naked woman who smiles insouciantly out of the canvas.
The Impressionists, a decade younger than he was, revered Manet as a trail-blazing father figure, but sought to create something less challenging and more superficial – casual snapshots, almost, that randomly caught whatever was there. But Manet’s later work – he died in 1883, 10 years after Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro had led the first exhibition of Impressionism – shows that the influence went two ways. At times, it’s easy to mistake Manet for Monet and vice-versa.
None of these artists played a significant role in the political earthquake that erupted in 1870. Manet and his friend Degas, liberal and republican in their views, both patriotically served in the National Guard defending Paris during the Prussian siege, but they wouldn’t put themselves in the firing line, and along with their younger painter colleagues, they stayed well clear of Paris during the catastrophe of the Commune. Their art barely responded to either event, in a “no to history” that pulls Smee up short. He accepts that the absence of virtually any depictions of the violence and destruction “needs to be accounted for”, but his concluding explanation that “the Impressionist artists were in revolt against state-sanctioned hierarchies of art” is lamely unconvincing and evasive. Perhaps the casual sunniness of so much Impressionism is sheer escapism, the horror of it all – some 25,000 citizens massacred during the week of the Commune’s collapse alone, with much of the inner city left as burnt-out rubble – being simply too painful to contemplate. Did anyone feel moved to paint the ruins of Berlin in 1945?
Whatever questions linger unanswered, this is a book written in buoyant and accessible fashion, unimpeded by footnotes or scholarly apparatus beyond a modest bibliography. It paints subtle and intriguing portraits of Manet and Morisot, chummily referred to as “Edouard” and “Berthe”, and delineates a tortuous course of events with admirable clarity. As a straightforward introduction to the field, it could hardly be bettered. But what a pity that the illustrations are so exiguous.
Paris in Ruins is published by Oneworld at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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