Houses of Parliament, stormy sky

Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky from 1904 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille shows Monet's treatment of the London series' most dramatically atmospheric condition — the Gothic towers of Westminster under a turbulent, cloud-filled sky that transforms the symbol of British imperial order into a subject of sublime instability. The stormy sky variants of the Parliament series were worked up primarily in Monet's Giverny studio from the atmospheric observations made during his London visits, the studio process allowing him to orchestrate the chromatic drama of storm and fading light with a deliberateness impossible in direct plein-air observation. By 1904 he was completing the entire London series for their collective exhibition at Durand-Ruel, where thirty-seven canvases were shown together and reviewed as a unified philosophical statement. The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille holds this canvas within a collection that has strong French nineteenth and twentieth-century holdings, the institutional context of a major northern French museum giving the canvas a regional resonance — Northern France's industrial landscape and Atlantic weather connected it to the atmospheric concerns Monet pursued in London.

The architectural forms are barely legible, reduced to dark verticals against a turbulent sky rendered in dense, overlapping strokes of violet, grey, and stormy blue-green. Monet applies thick, impasted paint in the sky with an expressionistic energy that anticipates later twentieth-century abstraction.