Episode Details

Look at Monet's most famous painting in black and white and the sun disappears. This episode explores Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1872 from a hotel window overlooking the port of Le Havre, and how a small canvas of steamships and cranes came to name an entire art movement. It begins in a France still reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, where Monet chose an industrial harbor over a quiet meadow and even erased a row of houses from the scene to foreground smokestacks and cranes.

From there the conversation turns to neuroscience, the independent 1874 exhibition in a photographer's former studio, a sarcastic review that accidentally coined the word Impressionism, and the painting's later theft and recovery.

• How Harvard neurologist Margaret Livingstone used a photometer to show the orange sun and gray sky share identical luminance, and why that makes the sun appear to pulse
• Why the older, colorblind part of the visual system sees no sun at all while the newer primate cortex registers the orange, and how microsaccades create the vibration
• The series of six canvases Monet painted of the port at dawn, midday, dusk, and night, and how the painting was read as a patriotic statement of economic revival
• The 1874 show with Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, the spontaneous title Impression, and critic Louis Leroy comparing the work to unfinished wallpaper
• The 1985 theft from the Musee Marmottan Monet, its recovery in 1990, and Monet's habit of appending the word impression to later titles