Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement, effet de soleil)

This 1903 canvas — Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect — belongs to Monet's London series and shows the buildings bathed in warm golden light rather than the dissolving fog of other variants. The contrast between London's famous fog and the rare, luminous sunshine gave Monet the broadest possible range of chromatic effects to explore in this single subject. The series as a whole marked the high point of Impressionist serial painting and was exhibited together in Paris in 1904 to critical acclaim. The work is held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

The warm sunlight effect is rendered through a palette of golden yellows, pinks, and warm violets sharply contrasting with the cooler fog and overcast variants. The architectural forms have more presence here than in the atmospheric variants but are still substantially dissolved by chromatic vibration. Paint is applied in layered, hatched strokes of considerable density.