Houses of Parliament, London

Houses of Parliament, London is a painting by Claude Monet, begun during his London campaigns of 1900–01 and signed "Claude Monet" at lower right. It shows the Palace of Westminster across the Thames as a pale blue silhouette in a mist of turquoise, lilac and pink, with a spark of sun caught between its spires. The canvas, 81.2 by 92.8 centimeters, is in the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1933.1164), a bequest from the collector Martin A. Ryerson. Wildenstein lists it as number 1600.

What you're looking at

The palace stretches across the middle of the canvas as a single flat shape. Its great square tower rises left of center; a cluster of thinner pinnacles stands at right. Nothing is drawn; the forms are made of soft vertical strokes of blue and blue-green, darker at their bases and fading into the air at their tops.

The sky is a field of crisscrossing strokes in turquoise, aquamarine, pink and lilac, laid on in quick diagonals. At right, between two pinnacles, Monet places a few touches of yellow and orange: the sun, low in the west, breaking through the mist for a moment. A pale streak of rose and gold runs across the sky above it.

The river takes up the lower third. It is almost the same color as the sky, turquoise and lilac, so that the line between building and water is lost. A single boat, a faint pink triangle of sail, floats at lower right, the only sign of human life.

Blue mist: what makes this version distinct

The Parliament canvases range from dark silhouettes against burning sunsets to fogs so dense the building barely registers. The Chicago picture sits at the cool, airy end of that range. Its color is unusually light, almost pastel: turquoise and pink rather than the purples, oranges and deep blues of the later sunsets such as The Houses of Parliament, Sunset in Washington. The Pola Museum's Houses of Parliament, Symphony in Rose, also of 1900, has nearly the same composition shifted into rose and mauve.

The date matters too. Most Parliament canvases are dated 1903 or 1904, the years Monet finished them at Giverny. Chicago dates this one to 1900–01, the period when he was still painting in London, and it was recorded by his dealer as "Westminster, 1903." It shows the series close to its starting point.

How it was painted

Monet worked on the Parliament views from St Thomas' Hospital, on the opposite bank of the Thames, in the late afternoon and at sunset, when the sun was behind the building. He began the first of them on February 13, 1900. He kept dozens of canvases going at once and took them up as each effect returned, then reworked them at Giverny, sometimes for years. Here the paint is thin in places, with the weave of the canvas showing through, and built up in the sky in a dense net of strokes.

The Art Institute notes that Monet's viewpoint was close to the one J. M. W. Turner used for his paintings of the 1834 fire that destroyed the old Parliament, but that his feeling for dusk and mist owed more to the American painter James McNeill Whistler and his Thames nocturnes.

From Durand-Ruel to Chicago

The Paris dealer Rosenberg owned the painting by 1916. Durand-Ruel bought it in October of that year and sold it in December to Martin A. Ryerson, a Chicago lumber heir and one of the Art Institute's great benefactors, who bequeathed it to the museum in 1933.

Details to look for

The pink sail at lower right is easy to miss, but it is the warmest touch in the lower half and anchors the composition. Look too at the left side of the palace, where Monet lets the blue shapes dissolve into the turquoise air, so the building seems to come out of the mist from left to right. The signature, small and pink, sits on the water at lower right.

Where to see it

It hangs in the Art Institute's Impressionist galleries (Gallery 243 at the time of writing). See Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago, our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London and Claude Monet. Chicago also owns London views from the Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge series.