Early in 1871 Monet, with his friend Pissarro, went to London, taking in not only the city itself but its major museums, seeing the works of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable for the first time. In 1872–73, Monet painted his famous Impression, Sunrise, depicting Le Havre, a work which named (if it did not actually declare) the revolution in art that we now know as Impressionism, and which featured in the first “Impressionist” exhibition of 1874.

The work reproduced here—London, Parliament: Sun through the Fog—painted thirty years later, recalls this early, prototypical Impressionist painting and extends Monet’s ongoing meditation on the effect of light on a landscape.

Monet returned to London in the autumn of 1899. By this time he had completed many of his famous series of works, including the Rouen Cathedral and haystacks series, and he had begun working on his great water-lily paintings. Seriality represented for him not only a continuing meditation on the effect of light on a particular subject, but also a continuing meditation on the materiality of paint itself. His series of paintings, and particularly those devoted to London’s Houses of Parliament, many of which represent the acme of his oeuvre, highlight his lifelong obsession with the effect on the human eye of the physical substance we call paint. While this painting and the series of paintings to which it belongs are based on his 1899 stay in London, it was only in 1903 that he recommenced working on them—painting this time not from nature, as was his wont, but, significantly, from memory. In 1904, thirty-seven of these “Views of London” were shown at Durand-Ruel’s now-famous May exhibition in Paris.

The Symbolist poet and art historian Gustave Kahn observed: In one of these sunsets, the star is a visible, heavy disk from which emanate the most subtle variations of colour; elsewhere, it spreads like brimstone, like sulfurated smoke over Gomorrah, in clouds of violet, crimson, purple, and orange, and its reflections lap on heavy water of rose, blue, and green, with mica glints of rose everywhere bloodied with points of red. The sun breaches the fog, illuminating melded flakes of air and water.

London, Parliament: Sun through the Fog is without doubt one of Monet’s greatest hymns to the capacity of paint to represent our world, and is one of the truly great paintings of the twentieth century.

Inventory number: RF 2007 

Provenance:

until 1911, in the collection of Count Isaac de Camondo, Paris (at least from May 1904)
1911, accepted by the State as a bequest from Count Isaac de Camondo for the Louvre Museum (committee of 27/04/1911, council of 08/05/1911, decree of 23/11/1911)
1911, assigned to the Louvre Museum, Paris
From 1911 to 1947, Louvre Museum, Paris (on display from 1914)
From 1947 to 1986, Louvre Museum, Jeu de Paume Gallery, Paris
1986, assigned to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris from 1991 to 1992, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (from March 22, 1991 to January 27, 1992, exchanged on the occasion of the Seurat exhibition)