Monet went to London three times between 1899 and 1901 and worked the same three views. What he was after was not Parliament. It was the coal smoke: London's air was thick enough to turn the sun violet, orange or green, and he told a dealer that without the fog London would not be a beautiful city.
A hotel window and a hospital terrace
He took two rooms at the Savoy, one to sleep in and one to paint in, and from the window he had Waterloo Bridge one way and Charing Cross Bridge the other. For Parliament he had to cross the river: he worked from a terrace at St Thomas's Hospital, in the late afternoon and at sunset, looking back west.
Turner had painted the old Parliament burning down in 1834 from almost the same stretch of bank. Whistler had painted the same river in the same weather a generation before Monet got there.
He ran dozens of canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, and brought back over a hundred of them unfinished. Thirty-seven were worked up in the studio at Giverny, two hundred miles from the fog, and shown together in Paris in 1904. The London paintings were finished in the French countryside.
What the fog actually was
The fog was not weather. It was smoke — hundreds of thousands of coal fires in houses, plus the factories, plus sulphur dioxide, held down over the river. Londoners called the worst of it a pea-souper.
In January 2023 two researchers, Anna Lea Albright and Peter Huybers, published a study of sixty Turners and thirty-eight Monets. They measured the pictures: contours get softer, the palette gets whiter, and the change over the century tracks the rise in sulphur dioxide emissions. In the earlier paintings they put the visible distance at roughly fifteen miles. In the late London canvases it is about three and a half.
Monet always said he painted exactly what was in front of him, and his colours were not always believed. The measurements are on his side. The violet was there.
Nineteen Parliaments
Nineteen of the Thames paintings are of Parliament, and they are nineteen different hours. The building is a silhouette in all of them. In some it is blue, in some a bruised purple, in some barely there at all.
It helps to know how new it was. The Palace of Westminster that Monet painted had only been completed in 1870 — thirty years old, Victorian, the mortar barely set. He turned the newest big building in London into something that looked a thousand years old, which is what fog does and what paint can do.
The Chicago canvas took the usual route. Durand-Ruel sold it in December 1916 to Martin Ryerson, a Chicago collector, for ten thousand dollars, and he left it to the Art Institute, where it has hung since 1933.
Three winters at a window, chasing smoke. The building is barely there, but the violet is where he put it and the measurements say it was real.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.