Houses of Parliament, Symphony in Rose

Houses of Parliament, Symphony in Rose (Le Parlement, symphonie en rose) is a painting by Claude Monet dated 1900, from his series of views of the Palace of Westminster across the Thames. It shows the building as a gray-violet silhouette dissolving in a haze of pink and mauve. The canvas measures 82 by 92.6 centimeters and is in the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan. Wildenstein lists it as number 1599, immediately before the Art Institute of Chicago's cooler Houses of Parliament, London.

What you're looking at

The composition is the classic one of the series. The palace runs across the middle of the canvas, its great square tower rising left of center and a row of thinner pinnacles at right. The forms are flat and soft-edged, painted in gray-blue and violet, darker near the water and fading into the air above.

Everything else is rose. The sky is a cloudy field of pink, lilac and gray, painted in loose, circling strokes. Low at right, behind the pinnacles, a patch of warmer pink and pale yellow suggests where the sun is setting. The river, filling the lower third, repeats the sky's colors so closely that the reflection of the palace is just a slightly darker band. A faint boat shape, a pale triangle of sail, is barely visible in the water at center right.

The signature, "Claude Monet," is at lower right.

Symphony in rose: what makes this version distinct

The musical title belongs to a tradition Monet knew well. The American painter James McNeill Whistler gave his Thames pictures titles like Nocturne and Symphony, insisting that a painting was an arrangement of color, like music, rather than a record of a place. Monet admired Whistler and had visited London at his invitation in 1887. Calling a Parliament canvas a symphony in rose announces that its real subject is the single dominant color.

Within the series, it pairs naturally with two others. Chicago's version of the same years has nearly the same layout in turquoise and blue; the High Museum's Houses of Parliament, Symphony in Blue carries the same musical label in a different key. Compared with the dramatic sunsets of 1903–04, such as Houses of Parliament, Sunset in Zurich, this is a quiet, muted picture: no visible sun, no strong contrast, just a single atmosphere.

How it was painted

Monet painted the Parliament views from St Thomas' Hospital, across the river from Westminster, in the late afternoons of 1900 and 1901, working on many canvases at once and returning to each as its light reappeared. He finished most of them at Giverny in 1903–04. The surface here is thin and soft, with the paint scumbled over the ground so that the texture of the canvas plays a part. The reproduction available online is an older printed scan with visible lines; the original surface is smoother.

The Pola Museum

The Pola Museum of Art opened in 2002 in Hakone, in the mountains southwest of Tokyo, to show the collection formed by Suzuki Tsuneshi, the head of the Pola cosmetics company. It holds one of Japan's largest groups of Monet paintings, including an early stack picture, Haystacks at Giverny.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, often on view in its Impressionist galleries. See our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London, Where to See Monet and Claude Monet.