The water lilies that calm dentist waiting rooms were painted by a starving radical who chose military deployment over his father's money and who, sitting beside his dying wife, caught himself analyzing the shifting colors of her face. This episode strips the pastel mythology from Claude Monet. We begin in Le Havre, where a teenage caricaturist met Eugene Boudin and learned to paint outdoors, then follow the 1861 draft, his refusal of a buyout conditioned on abandoning his style, and the year in Algeria whose light he later called the germ of all his research.

We trace the clash with the Salon's demand for invisible brushstrokes, the destitution of 1868 when creditors seized canvases off the easel, exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War, and the 1874 independent show where critic Louis Leroy mocked Impression, Sunrise and accidental ...