Atmospheric Landscapes
Landscapes dominated by mist, haze, rain or soft light, where air and weather blur the view.
1,171 works · 10 related artists
About
Atmospheric landscapes are about air as much as land: mist, rain, smoke and low sun soften edges and swallow distance. Tone and thin veils of colour replace firm contour. Chinese artists of the Northern Song made mist central; in Guo Xi's Early Spring (1072) mountains appear and vanish in drifting cloud, and in Japan Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees screens (late 16th century) leave much of the paper to fog.
In Europe, Leonardo da Vinci described how distant things turn pale and blue, and later painters made that effect the subject. J. M. W. Turner dissolved a train into storm in Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), James McNeill Whistler's Nocturnes of the 1870s turned the Thames at night into near-monochrome, and Claude Monet painted the Houses of Parliament again and again in London fog around 1900. The American Tonalists, George Inness among them, favoured dusk and damp air.
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