About this work
In this view of London's Houses of Parliament on a foggy day, Monet captured an atmosphere suffused with moisture, dissolving the distinctions between sky, buildings, and water.
The elaborate Gothic spires are reduced to hazy silhouettes, their intricate details dissolved by the pervasive London fog and atmospheric effects.
A flock of seagulls scattered across the painting's surface enlivens the scene — pale, flickering shapes that become part of the atmosphere itself, suspended between the vaporous Thames and the barely-there skyline above. Unlike contemporaries who used a subdued palette to reproduce the grayness of the city, Monet perceived color in every form: drifting mists painted with delicate shades of lilac and pink, the sky tinged with pale olive. The building is less an architectural presence than a mood — a dark, violet-tinged mass that seems to grow directly out of the river.
Monet painted several series of nearly 100 Impressionist oil paintings of different views of the Thames River during stays in London in the autumn of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and 1901.
All of the Parliament series' paintings share the same viewpoint from a terrace at St. Thomas's Hospital overlooking the Thames, and the same canvas size of approximately 81 × 92 cm.
Monet's fascination with London lay primarily in its fogs, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution — and writers hypothesize that he was also inspired by contemporaries J. M. W. Turner and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who were similarly fascinated by London's atmospheric effects.
By this point in his career, Monet had abandoned the practice of completing a painting on the spot; he carried on refining the images back home in Giverny, sometimes sending to London for photographs to help in this process.
Thirty-seven of his Thames views were included in an exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1904, which became one of Monet's most successful gallery shows.
This painting rewards a contemplative room — a study, a reading corner, a bedroom with morning light — where its silvery quiet can settle. Monet's series eschews overt political symbolism in favor of formal abstraction, with its focus on blurred forms and atmospheric integration highlighting perceptual and aesthetic concerns over literalism. The seagulls give it an uncommon sense of restless life that distinguishes this canvas from others in the series; there is movement here, a breath of open air, even within all that fog. It speaks to the viewer drawn to stillness with something unresolved in it — a painting that doesn't announce itself but deepens the longer it
