Ilse’s Reviews > Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism > Status Update

The events of 1870-71 impressed on everyone who experienced them a profound sense of precariousness. Many who lived through the Terrible Year succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility, and it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality.