Sebastian Smee (art critic, The Washington Post) will speak about how Impressionism, a movement which most of us rightly associate with light and color and beauty, actually came out of a dark and traumatic period in the history of France—and of Paris in particular. He will tell the story of how a group of maverick artists were caught up in the political turmoil of the 1860s and 70s, and how three of the group’s leading painters, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, found themselves trapped in Paris in 1870 and ’71, when the French capital was besieged by German-speaking troops and its inhabitants reduced to starvation. He’ll explain how France’s political divisions were sharpened in the wake of the siege, leading into an insurrection in Paris and a violent civil war—the Paris Commune and Bloody Week—and he’ll talk about the various ways in which the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 was connected to all this political tumult. Finally, he’ll speak about how these events may have affected the art the Impressionists made—both the subjects to which they were attracted and the manner in which they painted. What, he will ask, is the nature of the relationship between political events and the cultural sphere? How do these connections appear in art, both directly and indirectly?