Cream of Turnip Soup

I'm getting quite a collection of artist inspired cookery books (this is the Holy Grail that I am seriously saving up for), some make the tenuous links between a painting and a dish, some are charity compilations of recipes with the off one by a painter, and a very few are recipes of dishes they actually ate.
Monet's Cookery Notebooks was complied using Monet's own diary notes recipes, somewhat of a contrast to the starving artist cliche. The first half of the book is an account of his life in the French countryside with photos of his house (if you want to see pictures of the kitchen they can be found on Ms Marmitelover's blog), and the second half contains the recipes.
Look at this assembly of ingredients. The most vital component, the water, is not pictured. A more appropriate title for this dish might be Hot Turnip Water, that's how thin the ultimate soup is. I deliberately, somewhat unfairly, took an unflattering photo of my bowl because I was so angry at having only this for dinner.
You boil the turnips in a lot of water with some butter and blend. Add salt and pepper, more butter, or cream which I didn't have, and presumably enjoy. 'Evening meals at Monet's house always started with a soup' the book tells us, and as a first course this would be lovely. Look at this, I'm not even going to pretend with some clever styling trick that this is anything but a bland soup. As it is, there is too much butter in this for me to seriously consider it a diet food, but not enough flavour for it to be in any degree indulgent. Turnips are actually a guilty pleasure of mine, part of the cabbage family they have that nice tangy crispness, but once cooked their muddy flavour comes through which is why it's a risk to put them at the forefront of a dish like this. It's not bad, but I probably wouldn't make it again.