Monet's Houses of Parliament: The London Series, 1900–1905

Monet's Houses of Parliament are a series of 19 known paintings of the Palace of Westminster in London, seen across the Thames from St Thomas' Hospital on the south bank. Monet began them in February 1900, during the second of three winter stays in London (1899, 1900 and 1901), and finished them over the next few years in his studio at Giverny; most are dated 1903 or 1904, one 1905.

They form one of three London series, with Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge, nearly 100 Thames canvases in all. Today the Parliament pictures are in museums including the Musée d'Orsay, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Pushkin Museum and the Musée Marmottan Monet.

What the paintings show

Every canvas shows the same thing: the long river front of the Houses of Parliament, with the Victoria Tower at one end and the clock tower of Big Ben at the other, seen straight on from across the Thames. The building is never described in detail.

Its Gothic Revival pinnacles, designed by Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin after the old palace burned in 1834, are reduced to a jagged silhouette, dark blue, violet or green against the sky.

The real subject is what lies between Monet and the building: fog, smoke, and the sun trying to get through them. In some canvases the sun is a red or orange disk low in the sky, its reflection a broken track of color across the water. In others, the sky is purple and gold and the river glitters.

In a few, a boat or a gull is the only sign of life. The canvases are almost all the same size, about 81 by 92 centimeters, which made them easy to work on in rotation and to hang as a set.

Why Monet painted London

Monet had first painted the Thames in 1870–71, when he fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War. It was there that he met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, and there he painted The Thames below Westminster, with the new Parliament building half-veiled in spring mist behind a jetty.

He also saw the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, whose London skies and dissolving light he admired, though he later downplayed the debt.

He came back almost thirty years later, in the autumn of 1899, partly to visit his son Michel, who was studying English there. He stayed at the Savoy Hotel, from whose windows he painted Waterloo and Charing Cross bridges. For Parliament, he needed a different viewpoint and obtained permission to work at St Thomas' Hospital, directly across the river. He began the first canvas, according to his own record, at about a quarter to four on the afternoon of 13 February 1900.

"Without the fog," he said, "London would not be a beautiful city." The coal smoke that made the city's air thick and colored was, for him, its glory.

How the versions differ

Monet painted Parliament mostly in the late afternoon and at sunset, when the sun was behind the building and it stood in silhouette. The differences come from weather and the time of the sun's fall.

• Sun breaking through fog: the building is a ghostly blue, and a pale sun burns a hole in the mist, as in the Orsay's Sun Breaking Through the Fog.
• Stormy sky: a turbulent sky of gray, blue and gold over a brighter river, as in Lille's The Houses of Parliament, London (Stormy Sky).
• Sunset: the whole picture turns orange, red and violet, the building a dark cut-out.
• Gulls and fog: a few canvases add a flight of seagulls or a lone boat, giving scale to the empty water.

Because he used the same viewpoint and canvas size every time, the changes of color are startling when the pictures are seen together: the same tower can be green, mauve, rust or nearly black.

How they were made

Monet worked fast on site, with as many as dozens of canvases stacked in his room, each tied to an effect, and he wrote to his wife Alice of despair when the fog lifted or the sun failed to appear. He returned to London in 1901, then stopped going and finished the series at Giverny from 1901 to 1904, reworking every canvas, sometimes, it seems, with the help of photographs and certainly from memory. When it became known that the pictures had been finished in the studio, some observers objected that "impressions" ought to be painted from life. Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel in 1905 that whether his London views were painted from nature or not was nobody's business, and that only the result mattered.

The paint is layered and dense, with dragged and scumbled strokes that build the haze out of countless separate touches of color. Up close, the "gray" fog is made of pinks, blues and yellows.

What do the Parliament paintings mean?

Monet framed the series as a matter of light, but the subject carried weight. The Palace of Westminster was the seat of the British government and one of the most famous buildings of the age, and the smoke that made Monet's fog came from the factories, steamers and coal fires of the largest city in the world. Some historians see the series as an image of modern industrial London, its monument half-erased by its own pollution. Others place it in a line of painters of the Thames, from Turner, who painted the old Parliament burning in 1834, to Whistler, whose Nocturnes reduced the river to a few tones. Monet's pictures sit between those poles: grand architecture, dissolving.

Exhibition and sale

In May 1904 Durand-Ruel exhibited 37 of the London paintings in Paris under the title Vues de la Tamise à Londres. The show was a success, and the pictures sold well, especially to American collectors, which is why so many Parliament canvases are now in American museums.

Where to see Monet's Houses of Parliament

The 19 known canvases include versions at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; the Kunsthaus Zürich; the Kunstmuseen Krefeld; the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; the Musée Marmottan Monet; and private collections, among them the Hasso Plattner Collection.

None is in a public collection in London. To see Monet's London in London, look for his earlier Thames below Westminster at the National Gallery. For the full story of Monet's London years see Monet in London, for more museums Where to See Monet's Paintings, and for the artist Claude Monet. The London fog pictures sit between the Mornings on the Seine and the Water Lilies in his series work.