Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect

Through a curtain of London fog, the Houses of Parliament loom like a shadowy silhouette, their spires barely holding their shape against the sky. Claude Monet painted this scene in 1903 as part of a whole series devoted to the same building, capturing it again and again under different skies and shifting weather. He was captivated by the city's thick fog, which blurred every hard line and turned Parliament into a soft, purple-gray phantom. Along the bottom, patches of gold and orange flicker across the Thames where sunlight manages to break through.

The way Monet made these paintings is almost as interesting as the paintings themselves. He began them outdoors by the river in London, but carried them home to his studio in France, where he finished many from memory while juggling several canvases at once. As a founder of the Impressionist movement, he was never much interested in capturing precise architectural detail. What pulled him in was the fleeting play of light and mist, and here the famous building nearly melts away, proving that his true subject was the mood of the air rather than the stone beneath it.