The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog)

Monet's 'Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog)' (1903) belongs to the London series he developed from visits made between 1899 and 1901, in which he painted the Houses of Parliament from his window at St Thomas' Hospital across the Thames. The painting was completed and exhibited in Paris in 1904 after years of refinement in his Giverny studio. Monet was fascinated by the way London's famous fog dematerialised its most iconic Victorian building into a silhouette of pink and purple, making it a pure atmospheric effect rather than an architectural record. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this as one of the most celebrated examples of his London series.

The Parliament buildings are rendered as a dark, almost silhouetted mass hovering in a pale, suffused atmospheric ground of mauves and pinks. Monet applies paint in soft, overlapping strokes that deny the building solidity and make it seem to float in the fog. The Thames foreground echoes the sky tones with subtle variation, the reflections barely distinguishable from the atmosphere above.