Why impressionism was not in fact born at 7.35am on 13 November 1872

Knowing the exact time Monet started painting Impression: Sunrise tells us absolutely nothing about the birth of a genre that evolved over 200 years

The birth of impressionism now has an exact date and time: it was invented at 7.35am on 13 November 1872, according to an astrophysicist who has calculated exactly when Claude Monet painted Impression: Sunrise, his smoky dawn vision of the port of Le Havre.

This makes a nice headline, but history, sadly for journalists, does not work like that. Things never really happen in a neat, packaged way. That's why the first historian, Herodotus, dedicated so much of his epic book about the wars between Persian and ancient Greece to a digressive discussion about the entire history of the known world: he was trying to get at the complexity of cause and effect.

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