Houses of Parliament, London
1900–1
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
81.2 × 92.8 cm (32 × 36 9/16 in.); Framed: 103.6 × 115 × 10.8 cm (40 3/4 × 45 1/4 × 4 1/4 in.)
Classification
painting
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
16584
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
During his London campaigns, Claude Monet painted the Houses of Parliament in the late afternoon and at sunset from a terrace at Saint Thomas’s Hospital. This viewpoint was close to that of the English artist J. M. W. Turner in his visionary paintings of the fire that had destroyed much of the old Parliament complex in 1834. In his response to the poetry of dusk and mist, however, Monet was actually inspired by the work of a more recent painter of the Thames, the American James McNeill Whistler.
About the Artist
Claude Monet · 1840–1926
Claude Monet, born Oscar-Claude Monet on November 14, 1840, in Paris and raised in Le Havre, Normandy, began his artistic journey as a successful teenage caricaturist. His formal training started at the Le Havre secondary school of the arts in 1851, where he received his first drawing lessons from Jacques-François Ochard. Around 1858, he met Eugène Boudin, who became his pivotal mentor, introducin...