The Houses of Parliament, Sunset

The Houses of Parliament, Sunset is a painting by Claude Monet signed and dated "Claude Monet 1903" at lower right; some databases give 1904. It shows the Palace of Westminster as a deep blue silhouette against a blazing sunset of gold, orange and pink, with the Thames below broken into flecks of reflected color. The canvas measures 81.3 by 92.6 centimeters and is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (accession 1963.10.48), part of the Chester Dale Collection. Wildenstein lists it as number 1598. It is one of the most reproduced pictures in the whole series.

What you're looking at

The palace runs across the canvas from left to right, a jagged wall of blue, teal and indigo. The great square tower rises left of center, its pinnacles crisp against the sky; to the right, a group of pointed spires climbs toward a tall, needle-like spire near the right edge. Nothing is drawn in detail; the forms are built from vertical strokes of blue laid over warmer underlayers.

The sky is the brightest of any Parliament canvas. It glows yellow and gold at upper left, where the sun is setting in a haze, and runs through orange and salmon to pink and violet at right. The colors are laid on in thick, swirling strokes, with patches of lilac cloud floating across.

The water is extraordinary. Below the palace, the Thames breaks into hundreds of short horizontal strokes of orange, yellow, pink, turquoise and blue, the reflections of the sky shattered by small waves. A single dark boat with a sail, its oarsman just visible, floats in the middle of the river.

Gold and blue: what makes this version distinct

Among the Parliament sunsets, this is the warmest and the most brilliant. In the Barberini's Houses of Parliament, Sunset, the sky is a somber purple and the sun a small red disk; in Krefeld's Le Parlement, coucher de soleil, it is a smoky brown. Washington's picture has none of that heaviness. Its sky is open and radiant, and its blue silhouette, set against gold, gives the strongest color contrast in the series.

It also gives more space to the water than most. The glittering reflections fill the lower third and connect the sky to the river, so the whole canvas seems lit from behind.

How it was painted

Monet painted the Parliament from St Thomas' Hospital, across the Thames from Westminster, in the late afternoons of 1900 and 1901, when the sun set behind the building. He kept many canvases going and returned to each as its effect reappeared, then reworked them at Giverny, where he had photographs of the palace sent from London. In 1904 Durand-Ruel showed thirty-seven of the Thames views in Paris.

A 2006 study by physicists who calculated the position of the sun in the Parliament pictures found that, despite the studio reworking, the series contains elements of accurate observation.

Chester Dale and the National Gallery

Chester Dale, a New York financier, and his wife Maud built one of the great American collections of French painting, which Dale bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art; it arrived in 1963. The museum's other Monets include Woman with a Parasol and his Giverny footbridge picture The Japanese Footbridge.

Details to look for

The oarsman in the boat at center is a single dark stroke, but he gives the river its scale and the scene its only human presence. Look at the left edge, where the building ends and the sky meets the water in a blur of turquoise and gold: the far bank of the river has dissolved completely. The signature at lower right is painted in dark blue across the bright water.

Where to see it

The painting is in the National Gallery of Art's West Building in Washington, D.C., in the French Impressionist galleries. See our Houses of Parliament series hub, Monet in London, Where to See Monet and Claude Monet.