Houses of Parliament, London

Monet painted the Houses of Parliament in the afternoon and at sunset from a terrace at Saint Thomas’s Hospital. This viewpoint was close to that of the English artist J. M. W. Turner in his visionary paintings of the fire that had destroyed much of the old Parliament complex in 1834. In his response to the poetry of dusk and mist, however, Monet was actually inspired by the work of a more recent painter of the Thames, James McNeill Whistler.