The same languid eroticism and limpid colour, evoking Gauguin's Tahiti, animates the sumptuous “Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)”, where six black boys in brilliant white shirts float at the centre of a watery idyll.

Though I apologise for my criticism, which Doig brushes aside cheerfully, I cannot help persisting with my reservations.

By not painting from life, Doig and most mid-career painters of the late 20th and 21st century have, it seems to me, a fundamentally different relationship with modernist painterly tradition from the generation above them – Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, even David Hockney.

On brown water choked with the flat discs of waterlilies, his shadow flickered. Time is important. Monet was the quiet centre of a world of bigwigs and upstarts, one which Wullschläger reconstructs from the artist’s copious (and hitherto untranslated) correspondence. “There’s an element of making in painting that’s very important – to use my clumsy hand,” Doig says as he fillets his fish.

It was not about the image overload and virtual relation to reality that determine visual experience – and therefore artistic creation – now.

Doig’s collage aesthetic – coalescing images derived from diverse photographs, films, memories and quotations from paintings in a single canvas – responds to this and is one of the things that make his work look contemporary, enigmatic and ambivalent.

His milieu is indeed one in which there are no foreign lands – an artist whose refusal of authenticity in favour of a secondhand cocktail of reveries, symbols and snapshots make him truly a global flâneur for our times. Wullschläger tells us to look again. Not that I think we’re cynical. They are a compelling record of how the young artist arrived at the poetic fusion of forms, found images, memories that characterise his mature depictions of mysterious, melancholy landscapes and lone figures.

No Foreign Lands, Doig’s new show at the Scottish National Gallery, proves that his exploration of visual delight is a queasier, more elusive, historically fraught affair than it at first seemed. “I don’t look at it like that. I realise now that I probably wouldn’t be able to do that any more, sadly – that spontaneous approach, open to influences, excited about seeing new things.” At the time he was supporting himself as a dresser at the English National Opera – earning £48 a week, of which £4 went in rent for community housing in King’s Cross – and absorbed in London’s club scene.

A ziggurat of sound speakers installed for carnival dominate the palms and hills of “Maracas”.

Zola joked that ‘Monet loves water as one loves a sweetheart’; the artist himself employed a different epithet: ‘the slut!’ The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bragged he could ‘mint money’ with Monet’s seascapes. Moro is close to Doig’s current London studio and a few yards from his first, a basement squat on the corner of Rosebery Avenue in the 1980s. Le Havre, when Monet grew up there, was far from a sleepy seaside town.

Enduring devastating bereavements, he pushed the frontier of painting inward, to evoke memory and the passing of time.