Houses of Parliament, stormy sky

Monet's Houses of Parliament canvases, produced during his London visits and reworked in his Giverny studio through 1904, represent the most extreme dissolution of architectural form in his career. This stormy-sky variant depicts the Gothic spires of Westminster under thunderous, churning clouds that merge with the river below, creating an image of the sublime modern city. The Parliament series pushed the serial method Monet had developed in the Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral to its logical limit, with over thirty canvases exploring the same motif under different atmospheric conditions. The work is held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille.

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.