Houses of Parliament, Sunset

Monet composed this theme nineteen times; this is probably the version with the most dramatic mood. His location was a terrace of St. Thomas Hospital, not far from Westminster Bridge. With such paintings, the painter places himself in the tradition of Turner and Claude Lorrain. Monet loved this painting so much that he did not want to give it out of his hand at first. A version of the same mood, much more strongly worked on in the studio, completely 'painted over' and correspondingly gentler, more heavily influenced by the style of the times, reached the Louvre in 1911 (Paris, Musée d'Orsay; Daniel Wildenstein: Monet. Catalog raisonné, 4 vols. (Cologne 1996), vol. IV, no. 1610).