Le Parlement, coucher de soleil

Le Parlement, coucher de soleil from 1904 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld is one of the sunset Parliament variants that demonstrates the series' extraordinary range of chromatic intensity. The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum — now known as the Krefeld Museums — was a pioneer in acquiring French avant-garde art in Germany, and its early twentieth-century director Friedrich Deneken made it one of the first German institutions to seriously engage with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. The Krefeld Museum's acquisition of a Parliament sunset canvas reflects this forward-looking collecting program, and the work entered a collection that included other major French Impressionist works. The 1904 sunset variant shows the Parliament buildings in the full dramatic warmth of the series' sunset palette — deep oranges, copper tones, and the complementary violet of river and shadow — representing the most immediately appealing of the chromatic conditions Monet documented in this series.

Orange dominates the upper half of the composition — a dense accumulation of warm strokes in the sky above the Parliament — while violet and deep blue-purple fill the lower river, the two zones separated by the dark silhouette of the building. The complementary contrast of orange and violet is pushed to maximum saturation.