Thanks to Monet and his water lilies, Impressionist painters have gained a reputation for being a bit splodgy, brightly coloured, and concerned with trying to capture the fleeting nature of the quality of light, permanently on canvas. But they were so much more than that. They were recorders of the real world, rather than the sanitised and romanticised version the art establishment of the time believed ought to be depicted. More importantly, they were recorders of the beginnings of the modern world, a world that was increasingly being shaped by the rapid development of industrial-scale transport.