The painting had sold at Sotheby's New York in the spring of 2001 for $14,580,750 when it had an estimate of $9,000,000 to $15,000,000 and it had previously sold at auction in 1989 for about $9,000,000.

The 2001 catalogue entry for the painting gave the following commentary:

"More than any other artist, Monet is famed, justly, for his series of paintings, most notably depicting the cathedral in Rouen, poplars, the Houses of Parliament, water lilies and haystacks. He made several trips to London between 1899 and 1904 and in 1904 allowed his dealer, Durand-Ruel, to show 37 of his views of the Thames. There are 19 "identified" Houses of Parliament paintings, 14 of which are in public institutons such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Musée Marmottan and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

The catalogue provides the following quotation by Monet about London's fog: "The fog in London assumes all sorts of colors; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs. My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog, more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change on canvas." In 1903, he wrote to Durand-Ruel that "I cannot send you a single canvas of London, because, for the work I am doing, it is indispensable to have all of them before my eyes, and to the tell the truth not a single one is definitely finished. I work them all out together or at least a certain number, and I don't yet know how many of them I will be able to show because what I do there is extremely delicate. One day I am satisfied, and the next everything looks bad to me, but anyway there are always several good ones."

"The backlit mass of the Houses of Parliament is counterpointed by swirling, vivid reds, yellows, oranges and purples, thickly applied, that capture the light o the setting sun in the sky and the water," the catalogue stated.