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.