In September, 1870, while Prussian soldiers were trying to starve Paris into surrender, Claude Monet was in Normandy with his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean, looking for a boat out of France. They weren’t alone. Every day, hundreds of people went down to the docks in the hope of escaping the Franco-Prussian War; only later would Monet learn that some of his best friends had shoved through the same crowd. By November, he and his family had reached London, though they spoke no English. Months passed, and the Siege of Paris gave way to the Paris Commune and thousands of murdered civilians. The Monets moved on to the Netherlands, where Camille taught French and Claude painted canals. In photographs taken in Amsterdam around this time, their eyes look a decade older than the rest of them. They bought pots for a garden they might grow when the killing stopped.
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