Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing is a Fish, a weekly

podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan

Treiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and John Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in particular order here we go starting with fact

number one and that is Johnny. My fact is when the impressionist Claude Monnet lived at Giovanni, he had six gardeners, one of whose

whole job was to dust and wash the water lilies and clean the surface of the water.

I guess if you're famous for painting water,

at least you want them to look as good as possible,

don't you make sense?

Exactly.

They need to be picturesque.

Although maybe you wouldn't paint the bits of dust on them anyway.

How do you dust a water lily?

Mmm, what are you using for that?

A Hoover?

I think you just wet it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

But these were very special water lilies. They were specially imported from Japan.

Monnet was crazy about Japanese art, which you probably know had just arrived in France when Japan opened up in the 1850s to the west.

Right. All these prints started arriving and all the impressionists were crazy about them.

And Monet got a real bargain in Zandam, he was in Holland for a bit,

and there was a porcelain dealer who didn't know that these Japanese

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