Mist and Fog in British and European Painting Fuseli, Friedrich, Turner, Monet and their Contemporaries

by Firestone, Evan R.

• ISBN13: 9781848225732
• ISBN10: 1848225733
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-06-30
• Publisher: Lund Humphries

Summary

Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vapourous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and fog with the passage of time, the vagaries of memory, and feelings of uncertainty. Mist and fog obscure, conceal, and when they dissipate, reveal. Vapourous atmosphere in art and life masks evil and can elicit presentiments of death. It also has been used in art to convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the supernatural. The metaphorical meanings that have accrued to mist and fog, encouraged by their indeterminate and transitory nature, and the emotions to which they give rise, are variously evident in the work of major artists and their contemporaries. This book focusses on mist and fog from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in the places they most proliferated. Examples of literature that employ mist and fog as metaphor and in allegory from antiquity to Joseph Conrad serve to amplify many of the paintings discussed.

Author Biography

Evan R. Firestone is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia, USA. Previous titles: Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-Century Art: Kandinsky, Ernst, Pollock and Beuys.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations; Preface and Acknowledgements; Introduction: A Brief History of Mist and Fog in British and European Painting; Mist and Gothicism in British Painting; Friedrich and Romantic Landscape; Turner: Mist, Memory, Time; Impressionism: The Atmospheric Envelope; Conclusion: Another Look at the Sublime; Bibliography