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 accidentally named a movement. After Camille’s death in 1879, Monet turned from people to elemental subjects and developed his series method, painting grainstacks, poplars, Rouen Cathedral, and 41 views of Waterloo Bridge as light changed. At Giverny he engineered a water garden as an optical laboratory, and when cataracts filtered out blues and greens, his fiery, near-abstract late canvases anticipated the abstract expressionists who rediscovered them in the 1950s.

• Why painting en plein air was controversial in the mid-19th century and how it forced speed and visible brushwork
• The London fog as subject rather than obstacle, and Monet’s study of Turner
• The 1884 Bordighera trip that produced 38 canvases, lost when his dealer’s finances collapsed
• His refusal of cataract surgery for years after Mary Cassatt’s botched operations, and the reds and oranges that followed
• Georges Clemenceau tearing the black drape from Monet’s coffin in 1926