Houses of Parliament, Sunset

By the time Monet dated this canvas 1903, he had not stood on the Thames in two years. He made his studies in London across three winters around 1900, painting the Houses of Parliament from a terrace at St Thomas' Hospital, then carried them home to Giverny and finished them there from memory and pigment. What he was really after was the London fog. The coal smoke that choked the city gave the air its colour, and Monet said it was the fog that made London worth painting at all. Here the towers of Westminster sink into a red and violet dusk, more silhouette than stone. This is one of 19 versions he brought to that pitch, worked up long after the light he saw had gone.