Houses of Parliament (Monet series)

Some of the 19 known paintings in the Houses of Parliament series:[5]

• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, 1900–1901 The Art Institute of Chicago
• 
  Parlement, coucher du soleil (sunset), 1902, private collection
• 
  Le Parlement, Effet de Brouillard, 1903, Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida)
• 
  Houses of Parliament in the Fog, 1903, High Museum of Art[6]
• 
  The Houses of Parliament, Seagulls, 1903, Princeton University Art Museum
• 
  The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, 1903, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.
• 
  Houses of Parliament Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement effet de soleil), 1903, Brooklyn Museum[7]
• 
  The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), 1903–1904, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Trouée de soleil dans le brouillard (Sun Breaking Through the Fog) Houses of Parliament, 1904. London, Sun Breaking Through the Fog, 1904 Musée d'Orsay, Paris
• 
  Houses of Parliament, stormy sky, 1904, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, Lille, France[8]
• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, ca. 1904, Kunsthaus Zürich
• 
  Seagulls, the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament, 1904, Pushkin Museum
• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, Musée Marmottan Monet, 1905
• 
  Le Parlement, soleil couchant (Houses of Parliament, Sunset), 1900-1903, Hasso Plattner Collection[9]
• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, 1904[10]
• 
  Modern view of the Houses of Parliament at dusk in an approximately identical angle. The paintings were framed to exclusively depict the leftmost half of the building, with Victoria Tower as the focal point.

Cleveland Museum of Art, 92 cm (36.2 in) x 123 cm (48.4 in). This painting by J. M. W. Turner depicts the Houses of Parliament as seen from near Waterloo Bridge. Monet painted series of paintings of each of these structures after he gained an "enthusiastic admiration" of Turner's work during the late 1880s.[11][12]

Under exile during the Franco-Prussian War, Monet travelled to London for the first time in 1870.[13] Monet became enthralled with the city, and vowed to return to it someday. Monet's fascination with London lay primarily in its fogs,[14] a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. But writers hypothesize that Monet was also inspired by contemporaries J. M. W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who were similarly fascinated by London's atmosphere and atmospheric effects in general.[15][11] Thus, in 1899, Monet returned to London and rented a room in the Savoy Hotel, which offered an extensive viewpoint from which to begin his series of the city.[16]

Between 1899 and 1905 Monet periodically travelled to London to paint.[17] In addition to the Houses of Parliament paintings, Monet created other paintings of the city's sights, including the Charing Cross Bridge series and Waterloo Bridge series. While Monet began all of the paintings in London, he completed many of them in his studio in Giverny. As a result, some critics question whether the paintings are completely accurate.[18] On the other hand, analyses of solar positioning reported in 2006 show that Monet's paintings "contain elements of accurate observation and may potentially be considered as a proxy indicator for the Victorian smogs and atmospheric states they depict."[19] A 2023 study shows that stylistic changes from more figurative to impressionistic paintings by Turner and Monet over the 19th century strongly covary with increasing levels of air pollution. In particular, stylistic changes in their work toward hazier contours and a whiter color palette are consistent with the optical changes expected from higher atmospheric aerosol concentrations. These results indicate that Turner and Monet’s paintings capture elements of the atmospheric environmental transformation during the Industrial Revolution.[20]

• List of paintings by Claude Monet

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Houses of Parliament Series (Monet).

• Baker, Jacob; Thornes, John E. (8 December 2006). "Solar Position within Monet's Houses of Parliament". Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 462 (2076): 3775–3788. Bibcode:2006RSPSA.462.3775B. doi:10.1098/rspa.2006.1754. S2CID 129004829.