ABSTRACT
“They are lovely, those fogs – and I am their painter !” These words, written by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) in a letter from his correspondence, clearly underline his personal and unique association with fog. If the artist often complained about the imperfection of nature (while still claiming to draw inspiration from it), he compensated for this by consciously aestheticising it. This chapter reflects on the depiction of an elusive, ungraspable and fluid subject, London fog, as a late nineteenth-century meteorological, climatic, and historic phenomenon which was central to the development of a Whistlerian aesthetics. Over thirty five years, from 1859 to 1896, the artist interacted with the external world through the prism of his nocturnes, focusing mainly on central London and the Thames’ urban surroundings, deeply transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Those blurred representations can be seen as a sensitive testimony to a quintessentially British feature, as well as an attempt on the part of Whistler to directly engage with his environment and provide us with a new key to better grasp his creative process.
