Seagulls, the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament

Seagulls, the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament is a painting by Claude Monet signed and dated "Claude Monet 1904" at lower right. It shows the Palace of Westminster as a faint blue shape in a milky, lilac fog, with seagulls flying low over the river in front of it. It is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (inventory Ж-3306) and was once owned by the great Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin. Wildenstein lists it as number 1613, the last number in his catalogue's run of Parliament pictures.

What you're looking at

At first glance the canvas seems almost empty: a field of pale lilac, pink and blue-white. Then the palace appears at upper right, its great tower a soft blue column, its lower buildings a band of blue-violet stretching to the left. The forms have no edges; they are just slightly darker areas of fog.

The gulls bring the picture into focus. A dozen or more are scattered across the lower half, skimming the water: white birds with outstretched wings, some caught in light, a few darker. More fly higher up, around the tower. They are painted in single quick strokes, a white V or a gray flick, and they are the only sharp marks on the canvas.

At left, on the river, a small boat shows as a blue cross-shaped silhouette, perhaps a mast and sail. Near the bottom, a few touches of pink and coral suggest a warmer light on the water. The signature runs along the lower right in pink.

Gulls in a white fog: what makes this version distinct

This canvas has a close twin, Princeton's The Houses of Parliament, Seagulls of 1903, which shows the same motif in a warmer, pinker fog with the birds spread higher across the sky. The Moscow version is paler and quieter. Its fog is closer to white, the palace is even fainter, and the gulls gather near the water, as if feeding on the river.

It belongs with the lightest pictures in the series, such as Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog in St. Petersburg, Florida, also dated 1904, and the High Museum's Symphony in Blue. In all three, Monet reduced the city almost to nothing and painted the light around it.

How it was painted

Monet painted the Parliament views from St Thomas' Hospital, across the Thames from Westminster, during his London trips of 1900 and 1901. He reworked the canvases at Giverny until the opening of his Thames exhibition at Durand-Ruel in May 1904, where thirty-seven London pictures were shown. In this pale picture, the work is all in small changes of tone: thin, dry layers of pink, lilac and blue-white laid over each other until the building just emerges.

Shchukin and Moscow

Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant, built one of the most adventurous collections of modern French art in the world in the years around 1900, buying Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. After the 1917 revolution his collection was nationalized and later divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which holds the London view Waterloo Bridge, Effect of Fog.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, in its collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art. See our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London, Where to See Monet and Claude Monet.