Le Parlement, coucher de soleil

Le Parlement, coucher de soleil (Houses of Parliament, Sunset) is a painting by Claude Monet signed and dated "Claude Monet 1904" at lower left. It shows the Palace of Westminster as a deep blue silhouette against a smoky, rust-brown sky, with a small orange sun hanging just to the right of the great tower. The canvas measures 81 by 92 centimeters and is in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, part of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld in Germany. Its inventory number, 1907.84, records that the museum acquired it in 1907, only three years after it was painted. Wildenstein lists it as number 1602.

What you're looking at

The palace stretches across the center and right of the canvas. Its great square tower, crowned with four pinnacles, rises left of center and is the tallest shape; to its right, a lower tower and then a group of tall spires reach toward the right edge. The silhouette is a dense, saturated blue, darker than in most versions, with almost no internal detail.

The sun sits beside the tower, a small, perfectly round disk of orange. It does not radiate; it simply glows inside the smoky air, which is painted in brown, rust, mauve and dull rose. Toward the upper left the sky turns grayer and cooler.

The river reflects the palace as a broad band of deep blue, broken into horizontal strokes that ripple downward. Around it the water takes the brownish rose of the sky. There are no boats and no figures. The signature runs across the lower left in dark blue.

Smoky sunset: what makes this version distinct

The Parliament sunsets come in several moods, and this is the smokiest. The Barberini's Houses of Parliament, Sunset has the same small sun beside the tower, but its sky is purple and its color more vivid. Washington's The Houses of Parliament, Sunset is golden and glittering, and the Kunsthaus Zürich's Houses of Parliament, Sunset shows the sun bursting into flame. The Krefeld picture is the most restrained: a deep blue shape, a single orange disk, and a heavy, brown-tinted air that recalls London's coal smoke.

That restraint gives it a monumental, almost graphic quality. With so few elements, the silhouette of the palace reads like a cut-out, and the sun like a seal set beside it.

How it was painted

Monet painted the Parliament from St Thomas' Hospital, across the Thames from Westminster, during his London trips of 1900 and 1901, and finished the canvases at Giverny in 1903–04, before Durand-Ruel exhibited thirty-seven Thames views in Paris in 1904. Here the sky is painted in thin, scrubbed layers with the canvas texture showing; the palace and its reflection are denser and more opaque.

Krefeld's canvas also shows how far Monet simplified the motif by 1904. Compared with the turquoise mist of Chicago's Houses of Parliament, London, painted three or four years earlier, there are no boats, no glints of light and almost no modulation in the building: just three colors and a single shape.

An early German acquisition

The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, an industrial city on the Rhine, collected the art of its own time from its early years. Its purchase of this canvas in 1907, when Monet was still alive and the London pictures were only three years old, was an early museum acquisition of a work from the series. It remains a centerpiece of the Krefeld museums today.

Details to look for

The left end of the palace does not stop cleanly. It frays into the smoky air in short vertical strokes, like a building seen through drifting smoke. Look at the reflection of the great tower, which drops straight down into the water as a column of blue broken by ripples, and at the sun, which has no reflection at all.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld (Kunstmuseen Krefeld). See our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London, Where to See Monet and Claude Monet.