Paris, January 1871 – the final, agonising days of the Franco-Prussian War. As the German army cements its advantage, shells rattle through the Left Bank. It is a bitterly cold winter; there is no fuel, no medicine, no food. The city’s poorer citizens have turned to eating rats, cats and dogs. France has been brought to its knees. The artists Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas are trapped in the besieged city. Auguste Renoir and Jean Frederic Bazille have joined regiments outside Paris. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro have fled the country just in time. Out of the siege and the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government, these artists developed a new-found sense of the fragility of life. A feeling for transience, reflected in Impressionism’s emphasis on fleeting light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes and the impermanence of all things, would change art history forever.