How London's suffocating yellow fog transformed the vision of Impressionist artists
In short: To Victorian painters, London's smog was not atmospheric; it was a catastrophe. While local artists viewed the murky, soot-filled air as a depressing nuisance that stifled light and color, a different group of foreign eyes began to see something else entirely within the haze.
For many London-based artists in the 19th century, the city's atmosphere was a source of profound frustration. The critic John Ruskin, writing in his later years, lamented a shift from pure air to a fog that allowed citizens to "choke yourself with your own nastiness." This sentiment was shared by painters like Luke Fildes, who in October 1880 described a period of five consecutive days of heavy fog so dense that artists had to burn gas just to eat, rendering painting nearly impossible. For those scraping a living, such darkness was economically catastrophic.
The impact was both physical and professional. The Art Journal noted in 1888 that the soot-driven blackness lacked depth and lustre, acting as a "denial of everything that the colourist loves." Even prestigious figures like Frederick Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, used his platform at the 1882 Lord Mayor’s dinner to argue that the quenching of light was an attack on the very heart of intellectual activity. To avoid the "ubiquitous yellow fog," many artists simply fled to the south of France or the Holy Land during winter.
While traditional conventions often rejected unruly, dirty urban subjects in favor of classical landscapes, the perspective began to shift. As explored in Dr. Christine Corton's lecture for Gresham College, it took foreign artists to find beauty in the haze, making the London fog more acceptable to the art world. This shift moved away from the earlier celebration of industrial energy, such as Turner's views of Coalbrookdale, toward a new way of seeing the modern, obscured metropolis.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: London Fog and the Impressionists - Dr Christine Corton
- Also: London Fog and the Impressionists
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