Claude Monet was not painting haystacks. He was painting light. The haystacks were incidental. What he wanted to document was what light does to a surface at seven in the morning versus four in the afternoon, in summer versus November, in fog versus clear sun. The Official Salon saw sketches. Unfinished work. The product of someone who did not know how to paint. They were wrong about what they were looking at.

Monet grew up in Normandy, the son of a grocer who wanted the same future for his son. The painter Eugène Boudin got to him first, teaching him to work outdoors, to look at actual light rather than imagine it in a studio. Monet went to Paris. He met Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Bazille. The Salon rejected them collectively and separately, repeatedly, for years.

In 1874, unable to get a fair hearing from any official exhibition, the group rented a studio from the photographer Nadar and showed their work themselves. A critic named Louis Leroy attended and filed a mocking review built around one Monet canvas — Impression, Sunrise. He coined the word "Impressionism" as an insult. The painters took the name and kept working.

The Kingmakers nearly won on economics. Monet spent years in poverty so acute he could not feed his family. His first wife Camille died in 1879, ill and exhausted. He begged for money. He destroyed dozens of his own paintings rather than sell them cheap.

He died in 1926 at eighty-six, nearly blind, still painting. His garden at Giverny — which he designed himself, built himself, and spent thirty years using as his primary subject — outlasted every critic who ever called his work unfinished.