On all good maps of buried treasure, X marks the spot, so for the letter x in this alphabet of landscape painting, I’ll consider some fine paintings of the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament) on the River Thames in London. For each of them we can determine within a few yards where the artist placed their easel.

Location

The present Houses of Parliament in London, so famous for their pinnacled roof and adjacent Big Ben, are less than 200 years old. A popular motif for painters from overseas, it is well situated on the ‘north’ bank (here, actually the west bank) of the River Thames, upstream from the City itself.

The original Palace of Westminster was a royal palace for Edward the Confessor, just before the Norman Conquest. He also built the adjacent Westminster Abbey (the ‘West Minster’, giving the name), the higher and dominant building until the new Palace was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This early royal palace was destroyed by fire in 1512, and soon became the home of the two Houses of Parliament, but was inadequate for that purpose, lacking proper chambers for them. The site gradually expanded, but there was no planning to provide suitable accommodation. It was extensively remodelled between 1824-7, then an overheated stove being used to burn the Exchequer’s store of wooden tally sticks set the buildings alight on 16 October 1834, and they quickly burnt to the ground.

While the Houses of Commons and Lords met in temporary accommodation, the current buildings were constructed to the designs of Charles Barry, in Perpendicular Gothic style. Most of the building work was completed by 1860. Although the site suffered bomb damage during the Second World War, the main buildings remain much as originally constructed.

Challenge

The most famous views of the current Palace of Westminster are of course from the river, with its distinctive Elizabeth Tower housing Big Ben, at the right. At the opposite end, to the south-west of the site, is the larger and higher Victoria Tower, and the middle of the waterfront has the smallest spire-like Central Tower.

The River Thames is an invaluable compositional aid when painting the Palace, but being quite broad at this point puts considerable distance between the painter and the buildings. This is exaggerated when the view is made over a diagonal across the river, such as from Lambeth Palace.

The river also brings its own lighting effects, particularly fog. Until the use of coal fires died out in London during the 1950s and 1960s, smoke and fog often combined to produce smog; when thin, its colour could enhance views, although smogs were also responsible for disease and many deaths.

Today this section of the River Thames has very little goods traffic, London’s upper docks having closed between 1960-90. The nineteenth century was a period of particularly heavy trade, though. The major enclosed basins were all situated downstream of Waterloo Bridge, and well away from Westminster, with smaller vessels plying their trade along the section in front of the Palace. Now most of the vessels are carrying passengers, either using the river as a rapid means of crossing the city, or as tourists.

Paintings

Samuel Scott’s Westminster from Lambeth, with the Ceremonial Barge of the Ironmongers’ Company (c 1745) shows this section of the River Thames on a windy day, with showers not far away. Teams of rowers pull their boats out to attend to the ceremonial barges in the foreground, reminiscent of Venetian boat ceremonies. The opposite bank shows, from the left, the imposing twin towers of Westminster Abbey, the old Palace almost hidden behind trees, and Westminster Bridge.

This was painted from Lambeth Palace (marked ① on the map). At this time, this stretch of the Thames was shown in plenty of topographical views, many of which were then engraved and printed. Scott’s view has more to it than those, with the action on the river, and its wonderful sky.

Taken from a similar location on the ‘south’ bank of the river as Scott’s painting, Canaletto’s The River Thames looking towards Westminster from Lambeth (1747) had the benefit of height, probably being painted from one of the towers of Lambeth Palace (① on the map), seen in the right foreground.

Although Canaletto, probably as a reflection of his Venetian works, captures the bustle of the multitude of vessels on the river, even the massive form of Westminster Abbey appears so far distant that it loses grandeur. The tiny old Palace to the right of it, although close to the centre of the painting, all but disappears. Westminster Bridge is brilliant white in the sunlight, and steals the centre of attention. Standing proud of the skyline at the far right is the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral to the north-east.

Paul Sandby’s View of the south end of the old House of Commons (1794) presents another solution to the relative insignificance of the Houses of Parliament: to ignore the river and paint up close against the building. This rapidly executed watercolour sketch of the old Palace gives a clear impression of the building long since lost to fire. It was painted from what is now the northern end of the Victoria Tower Gardens, a public park (②).

When the old Palace caught fire in 1834, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in the jam on Westminster Bridge (③), where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With Constable, his arch-rival, stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of the bridge (④). From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils, now in Philadelphia. The two prominent towers behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

His other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, on the ‘south’ bank still (⑤). At that time there was no Hungerford Bridge: the first bridge built at that point was a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in 1845, and in 1864 was replaced with a more massive structure to carry trains to Charing Cross Station. In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance. This version is also in the USA, in Cleveland.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings were not the atmospheric sketches that they might appear to be. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each in the studio for several weeks at least.

David Roberts’ The Houses of Parliament from Millbank (1861) shows the new Palace of Westminster during final completion work. In order to show the new buildings to best effect, Roberts positioned himself to the south, probably at the west end of Lambeth Bridge at Millbank (⑥). In doing so he lost the symmetry and regular structure of the building, its towers here looking almost haphazard. From the left and front they are the Victoria, Central, and Elizabeth, the latter just showing the southern clock face. The vessels shown are typical of the type known as Thames Barges, and were probably engaged in bringing materials to the site during construction.

Just a decade after Roberts’ conventional treatment of the motif, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster (1871) is a radical departure. Painted from the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, near what is now Whitehall (⑦), the three towers to the south are almost superimposed, and aerial perspective is exaggerated by the mist. The river is now bustling with small paddleboat steamers. In the foreground a pier under construction is shown almost in silhouette. The small waves and reflections on the river are indicated with coarse brushstrokes, adding to the impression that this is a rapid and spontaneous work.

Monet started painting formal series during the 1880s, when he was enjoying commercial success at last. From about 1896, almost all his works were part of a series. He started to travel through Europe in search of suitable motifs for these, visiting Norway in 1895, and later Venice. When he returned to London in 1899, and in the following two years, Monet chose a very different view of the Palace, from a location at the opposite end of Westminster Bridge, for his series of 19 paintings. These were all started from the second floor of the Administrative Block at the northern end of the old Saint Thomas’s Hospital on the ‘south’ bank (④), and completed over the following three or four years.

His The Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (1903) is even more radical than the painting of thirty years before, showing little more than the Palace in silhouette, the sun low in the sky, and its broken reflections in the water.

The Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903) shows the same view in better visibility, but with the sun setting and a small boat on the move in front of the Palace.

In The Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky (1904) the sun is higher and further to the south, allowing Monet to balance the silhouette of the Palace with its shadow cast on the water, and the brightness in the sky with its fragmented reflections.

The Houses of Parliament (1881) is Winslow Homer’s faithful representation of the Palace when viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, to the north (downstream) of the end of Westminster Bridge (⑧). The tide is high under the arches of Westminster Bridge, and small boats are on the river. This classic watercolour makes an interesting contrast with Monet’s later oil paintings: Homer provides little more detail, the Palace being shown largely in silhouette, but works with the texture of the paper and careful choice of pigment to give granularity. He provides just sufficient visual cues to fine detail, in the lamps and people on Westminster Bridge, and in the boats, to make this a fine example of masterful watercolour.

Tom Roberts’ Fog, Thames Embankment (1884) is painted from a similar location to Monet’s early The Thames below Westminster (1871), on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge (⑦), but is cropped much more tightly, cutting off the tops of the Victoria and Elizabeth Towers. The Palace and first couple of arches of Westminster Bridge appear in misty silhouette, with moored barges and buildings on a pier shown closer and crisper. He renders the ruffled surface of the river with coarse brushstrokes, but differently from those of Monet.

In Childe Hassam’s Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898), the sun has already set, and he is viewing the Palace in the gathering dusk from a point on the opposite (‘south’) bank, perhaps not as far south as Lambeth Palace (⑨). The Victoria Tower is prominent in the left of the painting, the Central Tower is in the centre, and the most distant Elizabeth Tower is distinctive with its illuminated clock face. Moored boats in the foreground provide the only other detail. His rough facture gives a textured surface to the water.

Emile Claus’s Sunset over Waterloo Bridge (1916) probably doesn’t quite include the Palace, because of its northerly viewpoint; it was painted from a location on the north bank of the Thames slightly to the east of Waterloo Bridge (⑩), the north end of which is prominent, and looks south-west into the setting sun, up river. Claus painted several views of Waterloo Bridge while he was in London, but doesn’t appear to have attempted any formal series, such as Monet’s, which also included a series of Waterloo Bridge.

Claus isn’t formulaic in his treatment. He uses billowing clouds of steam and smoke to great effect, and his inclusion of the road, trees and terraces in the foreground, on the Embankment, provides useful contrast with the crisp arches of the bridge, and the vaguer silhouettes in the distance. Like Monet’s series, this is likely to have been painted from a temporary studio inside a building.

Rain (2006) is one of two views of the Palace painted en plein air that year by Simon Kozhin; the other shows Elizabeth Tower and the Palace from the north, the viewpoint being on the Embankment just to the north of the end of Westminster Bridge. This view is less conventional, though, in showing the north end of the Palace on a dull, wet day, a tourist kiosk in the centre foreground, and the contorted branches of leafless trees beside it. The two prominent towers shown are the Central (mid left) and Victoria (centre) Towers, with their decoration delicately hinted in colour. Although quite detailed and thoroughly realist, reflections of the kiosk lighting on the wet road surface are painterly. This was painted from the pavement outside Portcullis House, close to the entrance to Westminster Underground Station (⑪).