Houses of Parliament, Sunset

Houses of Parliament, Sunset (Le Parlement, soleil couchant) is a painting by Claude Monet signed and dated "Claude Monet 1903" at lower left. It shows the Palace of Westminster as a dark blue silhouette against a purple evening sky, with a small red-orange sun hanging to the right of the great tower. The canvas measures about 81 by 92 centimeters and belongs to the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany (inventory MB-Mon-38). Wildenstein lists it as number 1604.

What you're looking at

The palace runs across the right two-thirds of the canvas, a jagged wall of deep blue. Its great square tower rises at center, crowned with pinnacles; lower blocks and spires spread out to either side, and at the far right another spire is half-lost in shadow. The forms are made of short vertical strokes of blue, indigo and violet, with no detail at all.

The sun is the focal point. It sits to the right of the tower, a small disk of orange set inside a halo of red and scarlet strokes that bleed into the surrounding violet. The rest of the sky is a dusky purple, warmer near the sun and grayer toward the upper left.

To the left of the palace the view opens down the river, where distant buildings and what may be a bridge dissolve into blue-gray haze. The water fills the lower third with horizontal strokes of mauve, violet and blue. A dark red boat shape floats at lower right, and the palace's reflection is a broad band of deep blue. The signature runs across the lower left in dark blue.

Red sun, violet air: what makes this version distinct

Several Parliament canvases show the sun as a visible disk. In this one it is small and intense, and the whole picture is pitched in purple, the most saturated and somber of the sunset versions. Compare the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum's Le Parlement, coucher de soleil of 1904, where a similar orange disk sits in a brownish, smoky sky, and the National Gallery of Art's blazing The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, where the sky is gold and orange and the water glitters with reflected color.

The Barberini picture is quieter and heavier than either. The sun does not light the scene; it glows inside a dense, colored fog, the London mixture of mist and coal smoke that Monet said made the city beautiful.

How it was painted

Monet painted the Parliament views from St Thomas' Hospital, on the south bank of the Thames directly opposite the Palace of Westminster, during trips to London in 1900 and 1901. From there, in the late afternoon, the sun went down behind the building. He worked on many canvases at once and returned to each as its light came back, then reworked them at Giverny in 1903–04, using photographs of the building sent from London. In 1904 he showed thirty-seven Thames pictures at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris. Here the paint is opaque and fairly thick. The sun is built from concentric touches of orange and red, and the silhouette from dense, overlapping blue strokes that let a little violet show through.

The Hasso Plattner Collection

The painting has been on the art market more than once; the image on Wikimedia Commons comes from a Christie's sale catalogue. It is now owned by Hasso Plattner, co-founder of the software company SAP, whose collection of Impressionist paintings, with more than thirty works by Monet, is shown at the Museum Barberini, which opened in Potsdam in 2017. The collection also includes the snowy stack picture Grainstack in the Sunlight, Snow Effect.

Where to see it

It is on view in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, near Berlin, as part of the permanent display of the Hasso Plattner Collection. See our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London, Where to See Monet and Claude Monet.