In the spring of 1871, revolutionaries during the Paris Commune nearly drowned a thirty-year-old painter sketching by the Seine, until their leader recognized him as the man who had once hidden him. That painter was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and this episode follows his working-class survival story from a tailor's family in Limoges to the walls of the Louvre.

We cover the singing talent Charles Gounod wanted to train, the porcelain factory job that ended when a mechanical stamping process replaced his brush in 1858, the hustle of painting fans and religious hangings, the founding of Impressionism with Monet and Sisley, the pragmatic retreat to the Salon and the Charpentier portrait that made him Paris's most sought-after portraitist, a 35-minute portrait of Richard Wagner, the crisis in Italy that made him declare he could not draw, his marria ...