Claude Monet
1904
Oil on canvas
For his third motif in the Thames series, Claude Monet ventured out of the Savoy Hotel and crossed the river. In February 1900, he secured permission to paint the Houses of Parliament from a private terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital on the south bank. Instead of the iconic Clock Tower (known as Big Ben), Monet focused on the Victoria Tower and the southern section of the building, painting its dramatic roofline as dusk descended. In its depiction of the fog over the Thames, Monet’s series was sometimes compared to a well-known group of muted paintings made by the American artist James McNeill Whistler some 30 years earlier, his so-called Nocturnes.