"Ever since scandal erupted in 1865 over his painting 'Olympia,' depicting a blasé prostitute wearing little more than a black ribbon around her neck, Édouard Manet had grown accustomed to bad reviews. But five years later, he felt that the journalist Edmond Duranty had gone too far. Manet spent the day before their duel looking for, of all things, appropriate shoes. ... The clattering fray was aborted when Manet’s sword brushed Duranty’s chest, at which point Manet gallantly made a peace offering to Duranty: his new shoes. They didn’t fit. An anecdote like this one — and there are many in Sebastian Smee’s deeply researched and suavely written 'Paris in Ruins' — gives us an inside view of the painter’s mercurial temperament (thin-skinned and competitive but also charmingly performative) on the eve of what Victor Hugo called 'the Terrible Year' of 1870-71. ..."
2017 March: Paris Commune 1871, 2021 March: Remembering the Commune
“View of Paris From the Trocadéro” (1871-73), by Berthe Morisot, who is widely recognized as “the most groundbreaking female artist of the 19th century.”
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