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Artist or Maker: Claude Monet (1840-1926)

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Provenance: Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Paris (acquired from the artist, May 1904).
Private collection, France.

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Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Monet. Vues de la Tamise à Londres, May-June 1904, no. 33.
Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Exposition Claude Monet (organisée au profit des victimes de la catastrophe du Japon), January 1924, no. 32.
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Oeuvres importantes de Monet, Pissarro, Renoir et Sisley, January 1925, no. 19.
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Quelques oeuvres importantes de Manet à Van Gogh, February-March 1932, no. 29.
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Peintures du XXe siècle (au profit de l'enfance malheureuse), March-April 1936, no. 46 (illustrated).
Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Centenaire Monet-Rodin, December 1940-March 1941, no. 54.
Zurich, Kunsthaus; Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts; and the Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Claude Monet, March-September 1952, no. 79 (illustrated, pl. 27).
Paris, Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., Monet, 1952, no. 72 (illustrated, p. 55).
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Claude Monet, July-September 1952, no. 79 (illustrated).
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Claude Monet, May-September 1959, no. 55.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments, March-August 1960, no. 89.
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Les sources du XXe siècle, 1960-1961, no. 473.
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel et Cie., Claude Monet, January-February 1970, no. 43 (illustrated).
Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Französische Impressionisten, Hommage à Durand-Ruel, November 1970-January 1971, no. 26 (illustrated in color).
London, Hayward Gallery, The Impressionists in London, January-March 1973, no. 29.
Tokyo, Galerie Seibu; Kyoto, Municipal Museum; and Fukuoka, Centre Culturel, Claude Monet, March-July 1973, no 56.
London, Somerset House, London and the Thames: Paintings of Three Centuries, July-October 1977, no. 97.
Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Schloss Belvedere, Claude Monet, March-June 1996, no. 75 (illustrated in color, p. 140).

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Literature: R. de Bettex, "Échos de partout. Claude Monet," La République française, 10 May 1904.
G. Kahn, "L'exposition Claude Monet," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July 1904, p. 86.
G. Geffroy, "Claude Monet," L'Art et les artistes, November 1920, p. 77, no. II (illustrated).
L. de Meurville, "A travers les expositions - A la Galerie Durand-Ruel," Le Gaulois, 6 January 1925, p. 3.
L. Vauxcelles, "La vie artistique. Les grandes expositions," L'Éclair, 10 January 1925, p. 2.
R. Brécy, "Chronique des arts. Les grands impressionnistes," L'Action française, 13 January 1925, p. 2.
H.S. Ciolkowski, "Exposition Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley," Art News, 24 January 1925.
L. Venturi, Les Archives de l'impressionnisme, Paris, 1939, vol. I, pp. 393-394.
G. Grappe, Claude Monet, Paris, 1941, p. 58 (illustrated).
H. Hertz, Les Impressionnistes, Paris, 1952, pl. 17 (illustrated in color).
L. Degand and D. Rouart, Claude Monet, Geneva, 1958, p. 95 (illustrated in color).
D. Pataky, Monet, Paris, 1966, no. 48 (illustrated).
J. House, "The Impressionists in London," The Burlington Magazine, March 1973, pp. 194-197.
S. Monneret, L'Impressionnisme et son époque, Paris, 1979, vol. II, p. 76 (illustrated).
G. Seiberling, Monet's Series, New York, 1981, p. 377, no. 51.
R. Gordon and A. Forge, Monet, New York, 1983, pp. 184-185 (illustrated in color, p. 185).
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne, 1985, vol. IV, p. 184, no. 1596 (illustrated, p. 185).
C. Cantin, D. Richard and T. Trudel, Propos d'Art, Montreal, 1989 (illustrated in color).
D. Wildenstein, Monet, catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. IV, pp. 704-705, no. 1596 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: Property from a French Private Collection

Between 1899 and 1904, Monet painted a series of ninety-five views of the Thames River in London, the largest group of pictures that he had yet produced. He had lived in London during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871 and had visited the city on at least four subsequent occasions, but had painted relatively little during these stays. In a letter to the critic Théodore Duret dated 1880, however, Monet indicated that he was already contemplating an extended cycle of London paintings: "When you come through Paris you can advise me on what the chances could be for me in coming to spend several weeks in London where I could paint some aspects of the Thames" (quoted in G. Seiberling, Monet in London, exh. cat., High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1988, p. 35). The artist finally embarked on the series nearly two decades later, traveling to London for three prolonged campaigns: September-October 1899, February-April 1900, and January-March 1901. On all three occasions, he rented a suite at the fashionable Savoy Hotel on the north bank of the Thames, with panoramic views of Waterloo Bridge to the left and Charing Cross Bridge to the right. A few hundred meters upstream, on the south bank of the river, lay St. Thomas's Hospital, the balcony of which offered a view directly across the water to the Houses of Parliament (figs. 1-2). From these two vantage points, Monet began at least forty-one paintings of Waterloo Bridge, thirty-five of Charing Cross Bridge, and nineteen of Parliament, each showing the motif suspended in a dense and vividly colored fog. When the series was first exhibited in May 1904, the poet Octave Mirbeau wrote:

A single theme in these canvases, single and yet different: the Thames. Smoke and fog; forms, architectural masses, perspectives, a whole deaf and rumbling city in the fog, fog itself; the struggle of light and all the phases of that struggle; the sun prisoner of the mists, or piercing, in decomposed rays, the colored, radiant, swarming depths of the atmosphere; the multiple drama, endlessly changing and subtly varied, somber or enchanting, agonizing, delightful, florid, tremendous, of reflections on the waters of the Thames (quoted in R. Gordon and A. Forge, op. cit., p. 187).

As Mirbeau suggests, Monet's decision to paint in London was inspired in large part by the extraordinary light effects that the city offered during the winter months, when the sun was diffused through a dense atmosphere of mist mingled with coal smoke from domestic fires and industrial furnaces. Indeed, a promotional brochure for the Savoy Hotel, published at the turn of the century, boasted not only of its luxuriously appointed rooms but also of its smoky, vaporous views of the Thames. In 1901, Monet described to an interviewer his perception of the city's celebrated fog: "The fog in London assumes all sorts of colors; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs. My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas" (quoted in G. Seiberling, op. cit., p. 62). Likewise, he commented to the art dealer René Gimpel:

I love London, much more than the English countryside; yes, I adore London, it's a mass, an ensemble, and it's so simple. Then in London, above all what I love is the fog. How could the English painters of the nineteenth century paint houses brick by brick? These people painted bricks that they didn't see, that they couldn't see. I so love London but I love it only in the winter. It's nice in summer with its park, but nothing like it is in winter with the fog, for without the fog London wouldn't be a beautiful city. It's the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Those massive, regular blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak (quoted in ibid., p. 55).

In addition to London's distinctive atmosphere, scholars have suggested several reasons that Monet might have chosen to return there in 1899. First, he had long held British culture in high esteem. He had a complete English breakfast every morning at Giverny, wore suits of English wool made to order, and sent his oldest son Michel to London to learn the language. Moreover, he was disillusioned with France following the Dreyfus Affair. England had often taken in French refugees during troubled times on the Continent, welcoming Monet and a host of other French painters during the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, and receiving Zola in 1898 after his libel conviction in association with Dreyfus. Finally, Monet was keen on expanding his market to include Great Britain, where his work had never sold well due to its high prices. In 1904, he went to England to try to find space to exhibit his views of the Thames "as an artist, for my personal satisfaction," as he wrote to Durand-Ruel (quoted in P.H. Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 173). Although the show did not materialize, Monet was not disappointed; the following year, Durand-Ruel staged a major exhibition of Impressionist painting in London, which was enthusiastically received by critics and collectors alike. Monet, who was well-represented in the exhibition, wrote to his dealer, "I am delighted with the success [of your show]. It is an excellent thing to have dealt London such a decisive blow" (quoted in ibid., p. 173).

Monet's interest in London surely stemmed as well from the fact that some of the greatest landscape painters in the history of the genre were English, most notably Constable and Turner. Monet is known to have studied these artists' work during his stay in London in the early 1870s and two decades later, he spoke admiringly of Turner to the American painter Theodore Robinson, referring specifically to the 1844 canvas, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railroad, with its extraordinary effects of light and atmosphere (fig. 3). Commenting on Turner's importance to Monet in London, Paul Hayes Tucker has written, "Monet was ultimately doing battle with Turner. No one could paint atmospheric effects in England without having Turner as a point of comparison. Few landscape painters in the history of art had been as inventive or as passionate, or had captured nature's elusive ways with as much power and poetry. Few were as individualistic or as moody, and few loved the sea more. Turner, therefore, was a soulmate, a guide, and a special challenge for Monet. If one were going to be a truly great landscape painter, this was necessary business to settle. It was also a way to assert the superiority of the French tradition and rise about the scandal of the Affair" (Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989, pp. 264, 266-267).

Upon his arrival in London in the autumn of 1899, Monet set to work almost immediately on his paintings of Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridges (fig. 4-5). A letter to his wife, Alice Hoschedé, indicates that he did not begin to paint the Houses of Parliament until February of 1900, during his second campaign on the Thames. Once all three motifs were underway, Monet kept to a strict daily timetable. In the morning, he looked east from the window of his hotel room, painting Waterloo Bridge with the rising sun behind it. As the morning progressed, he followed the course of the sun, facing toward Charing Cross Bridge to capture midday and early afternoon effects. Finally, in the late afternoon, he relocated to the balcony of St. Thomas's Hospital, looking due west to depict the Houses of Parliament silhouetted against the setting sun (fig. 6). Within each group of paintings, Monet altered his viewpoint slightly over time to create distinct sub-series. In seven of the nineteen views of the Houses of Parliament, including the present one, Monet shows the square block of Victoria Tower in the center, counterbalanced at the right by a group of three pointed spires (Wildenstein nos. 1596-1602; fig. 7). In another five paintings, Monet has turned slightly to the left, eliminating from the composition all but one of the spires (W. 1603-1607; fig. 8). To paint the remaining seven canvases in the series, he shifted his angle of vision to the left still further, resulting in the spires' complete disappearance (Wildenstein nos. 1608-1614; fig. 9). None of the paintings shows the Clock Tower at the northern end of the building, famous for Big Ben.

The three motifs that Monet chose to paint were all relatively recent constructions at the time. Waterloo Bridge was an elegant, classically detailed bridge for vehicular and pedestrian traffic, opened in 1817 to link the western end of London with the newly industrialized south bank. Charing Cross Bridge, on the other hand, was a functional pier-and-beam structure, built in the mid-19th century to carry trains from south London into Charing Cross Station. The Houses of Parliament or New Palace of Westminster was an ornate, neo-Gothic edifice designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1834, with an elaborate series of exterior bays and buttresses. Notably, the Parliament series is the only one of the three that includes no evidence of the modern, industrialized city. The views of Waterloo Bridge depict both the intense traffic on the bridge itself and the smoking chimney stacks in the distance, while the Charing Cross pictures show hurtling trains with plumes of steam rising from their engines. The Parliament canvases, in contrast, are devoid of human activity apart from the occasional boat. The city appears silent and timeless, with space and light articulated solely through the placement of the setting sun in relation to the silhouette of the building and its reflection in the water below. Describing the series, the scholar Paul Hayes Tucker has written:

In the views of the Houses of Parliament, the often obscured orb of the sun pushes out from behind the almost impenetrable cloak of clouds and the haunting silhouette of the Gothic-revival buildings to shoot its rays of orange, yellow, and red across the darkened sky and river. Undefined except by outline, the Houses of Parliament in these pictures appear like specters, their towers rising to various heights as if replicating some ancient hierarchy or medieval form of competition. As in his Cathedral paintings, the buildings also seem to celebrate the magical, transformative powers of light. They stretch upwards to greet it and then stand like solemn sentinels as it spreads across the sky (op. cit., 1995, p. 169).

Although Monet was exhilarated by his work in London, it also caused him great anguish. The slightest breath of wind over the river would modify the fog in a matter of seconds, filtering or blotting out the light, changing its quality from a warm, refractive haze to a dense, smoky blanket. As Monet wrote to Alice in 1901, "I can't tell you about this fantastic day. What marvelous things, but only lasting five minutes, it's enough to drive you crazy. No, there's no land more extraordinary for a painter" (quoted in G. Seiberling, op. cit., 1988, p. 58). In an effort to capture such elusive effects, Monet had dozens of canvases in progress at one time. In one letter to Alice, he mentioned that he had begun four different paintings by 9:00 a.m., in another that he had been working on more than fifteen in turn. In a later interview with the Duc de Trivise, Monet gave a vivid description of the difficulties involved in the project: "Where it became terrible was on the Thames; what a succession of aspects! At the Savoy Hotel or St. Thomas's Hospital, from which I looked at my points of view, I had up to a hundred canvases underway--of the same subject. By searching among the sketches feverishly, I chose one of them that didn't differ too much from what I saw; despite everything, I altered it completely. When my work was finished, I would notice, in moving my canvases, that I had overlooked precisely the one that would have suited me best and which I had at hand. How stupid!" (quoted in ibid., pp. 68-69).

After three campaigns in London, Monet decided to finish the series in his studio at Giverny rather than returning to the Savoy Hotel (fig. 10). In an interview with Maurice Kahn, he explained, "I had a devil of a time in London. I spoiled more than a hundred canvases. It changed all the time. And from one day to the other I didn't find the same landscape. What a hell of a country! After three years of work, and of revisions on the spot, I had to resign myself to only taking notes and to finishing here, in the studio" (quoted in ibid., p. 87). The series continued to give Monet great difficulty, and he worked on it at Giverny for nearly three more years. In March 1903, he wrote to Durand-Ruel, "No, I'm not in London unless in thought, working steadily on my canvases, which give me a lot of trouble. I cannot send you a single canvas of London, because, for the work I am doing, it is indispensable to have all of them before my eyes, and to tell the truth not a single one is definitively finished. I work them out all together or at least a certain number, and I don't yet know how many of them I will be able to show, because what I do there is extremely delicate. One day I am satisfied, and the next everything looks bad to me, but anyway there are always several good ones" (quoted in ibid., p. 80).

Monet finally exhibited thirty-seven paintings of London at Durand-Ruel's gallery in May 1904: eight views of Charing Cross Bridge, eighteen of Waterloo Bridge, and eleven of the Houses of Parliament, including the present canvas. The exhibition was a resounding success. Marc Joël of La Petite Loire called it "marvelous...one of the most beautiful demonstrations of pure art," while Georges Lecomte believed that Monet had never "attained such a vaporous subtlety, such power of abstraction and synthesis" (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1989, p. 267). Arsène Alexandre wrote, "This goes further than painting. It's an enchantment of atmosphere and light" (quoted in G. Seiberling, op. cit., 1988, p. 95). Even the critic for the conservative L'Action had to agree: "In his desire to paint the most complex effects of light, Monet seems to have attained the extreme limits of art. He wanted to explore the inexplorable, to express the inexpressible, to build, as the popular expression has it, on the fogs of the Thames. And worse still, he succeeded" (quoted in P.H. Tucker, op. cit., 1989, p. 267).

Of the three London series, Monet seems to have been most satisfied with the Houses of Parliament. He included more than half of the Parliament canvases in the 1904 exhibition and asked a higher price for them than for the paintings of Charing Cross or Waterloo Bridge (20,000 francs instead of 15,000). The views of Parliament were particularly well-received by critics as well. As the Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn wrote, "Parliament appears as though constructed of different densities. Here, in the sunset, it looks like a great green forest; its pinnacles, in their hazy outlines, look like foliage; thick clouds--violet, green, blue, streaked with purple and blood--roll across calm waters that reflect both the building and the sky, in a convent-like peace and solitude. And here, it appears woven in violet mist; behind it, in deep perspective, the forest of factory towers; it looks like a palace of Thule, a temple of silence, mystically conjured up, outlined, in the magic of the hour, in the ringing and brutal city, by Claude Monet's precise art" (G. Kahn, "L'Exposition Claude Monet," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1 July 1904).

Anticipating the success of the Parliament series, Durand-Ruel purchased nine of the finest versions, including the present one, before the opening of the exhibition in May 1904 and an additional three the following year. By 1915, seventeen of the nineteen paintings had been sold, many of them to prominent collectors such as Louisine Havemeyer, Charles Harrison Tweed, and Sergei Shchukin. Two museums, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, also acquired examples from the series at this time. Of the two remaining versions, Monet traded one for an automobile in 1916 and kept the second in his personal collection.

The present painting is one of only four from the Houses of Parliament series that remains in a private collection today. It was purchased by the family of the present owner in 1904 and has never changed hands since. Fifteen of the nineteen Parliament canvases now hang in major museum collections around the world: the Brooklyn Museum (W. 1597); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (W. 1598); Art Institute of Chicago (W. 1600); High Museum of Art, Atlanta (W. 1601); Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany (W. 1602); National Gallery, London (W. 1603, on loan); Musie des Beaux-Arts, Lille (W. 1605); Musée Marmottan, Paris (W. 1606); Kunsthaus, Zurich (W. 1607); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre (W. 1608); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (W. 1609); Musée d'Orsay, Paris (W. 1610); Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg, Florida (W. 1611); Princeton University Art Museum (W. 1612); and Pushkin Museum, Moscow (W. 1613).

(fig. 1) ABC Pictorial Map of London (detail), 1892. Barcode 20725945

(fig. 2) Charing Cross and Westminster Bridges, London, 1938. The Houses of Parliament are visible at the right side of the photograph. Barcode 20725952

(fig. 3) Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railroad, 1844. National Gallery, London. Barcode 20725969

(fig. 4) Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge à hauteur du Parlement, 1899 (sale, Christie's, New York, 30 April 1996, lot 36). Barcode 20725907

(fig. 5) Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, brouillard, 1903 (sale, Christie's, New York, 5 May 1998, lot 37). Barcode 20725914

(fig. 6) Photograph of Houses of Parliament, seen from due west. Barcode 20725938

(fig. 7) Claude Monet, Le Parlement, effet de soleil, 1900-1904. Barcode 20725921
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

(fig. 8) Claude Monet, Le Parlement, coucher de soleil, 1900-1904.
Kunsthaus, Zurich (Sold, Christie's, New York, 10 May 1989, Lot 5). Barcode 20725990

(fig. 9) Claude Monet, Le Parlement, effet de brouillard, 1900-1904.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Barcode 20725976

(fig. 10) Monet's studio at Giverny during his work on the London series. Barcode 20725983