Houses of Parliament (Monet series)

Claude Monet painted a series of oil paintings of the Palace of Westminster, home of the British Parliament, in the fall of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and 1901 during stays in London.^[1] All of the series' paintings share the same viewpoint from Monet's window or a terrace at St Thomas' Hospital overlooking the Thames and the approximate canvas size of 81 cm × 92 cm (32 in × 36 3/8 in).^[2][3] They are, however, painted during different times of the day and weather conditions.

By the time of the Houses of Parliament series, Monet had abandoned his earlier practice of completing a painting on the spot in front of the motif. He carried on refining the images back in France and sent to London for photographs to help in this. This caused some adverse reaction, but Monet's reply was that his means of creating a work was his own business and it was up to the viewer to judge the final result.

Gallery

Some of the 19 known paintings in the Houses of Parliament series:^[4]

• 
  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
• 
  The Houses of Parliament, Seagulls, 1903, Princeton University Art Museum
• 
  Le Parlement de Londres, soleil couchant, 1903, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.
• 
  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
• 
  The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), 1903–1904, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Trouée de soleil dans le brouillard, Houses of Parliament, 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
• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, ca. 1904, Kunsthaus Zürich
• 
  Parliament in London – Stormy day, ca. 1904
• 
  Seagulls, the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament, 1904, Pushkin Museum
• 
  Houses of Parliament, London, Musée Marmottan Monet, 1905
• 
  Photograph of the Palace of Westminster from London Eye

Public display

In 2018, the Tate Britain in London exhibited six paintings of the series, together in a single room, for the duration of an exhibition devoted to the temporary exile of French and impressionist artists in London during the Franco-Prussian War. This was a rare occurrence because no museum owns or exhibits more than two in a permanent collection.^[5][6]

The paintings were also shown at the Petit Palais when the exhibition travelled from London to Paris.^[7]

The six paintings were the examples from the following collections:

• Art Institute of Chicago
• Brooklyn Museum
• Kaiser Wilhelm Museum^[8]
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Musée d'Orsay
• Museum of modern art André Malraux - MuMa

References

Further reading

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.